Where is part one? Well a few months ago, Brendan wrote part one outlining the frustration we feel about everybody loving the "big boys" in the Twitter client space, never giving the smaller, (seemingly) the non-VC funded, open source clients a chance to shine.
It’s happened again, but this time its worse. Seesmic were yet again presenting at a major Microsoft conference (MIX10), banging on about how they got early access to the WinPhone7 Series hardware and SDK – how wonderful, another platform we simply can’t compete with because come day one, they’ll have not only had the emulator for longer, but physical devices to try everything on. And if we were to move to WP7S, we’d have to break the mindset of everybody who saw MIX/associated articles that "WP7S + Twitter = Seesmic". They are in the phone from before day one. You just can’t compete against that.
Oh, and something about updated desktop client that will include plugins – turns out via MEF, just like us. The one consolation I have is that all those promised features they keep banging on about – we’ve got them today. Now. 3 months ago. Not "in the near future" (anybody seen their iPhone client they promised? oh wait, doesn’t exist)
Unlike Brendan, I’m not venting at the general noisy ‘industry’ and how hard it is to get a break, but how the favourites of PDC will continue being the favourites on every platform Microsoft releases, so long as Microsoft keep handing out early access to the same developer again and again. This isn’t so much about MahTweets, but the frustration that Microsoft pick a favourite and will run forever with them – what about the other, smaller clients in this field? Where is the love for Witty, Blu, Halfwit, Sobees, or Gadfly?
It feels less like "Developers, Developers, Developers" and more like "Developers – those guys, the rest of you don’t matter"
Why even bother?
After MahTweets 3 (which is a very major version/update), I won’t be bothering – I’ll be getting out of the "game". MahTweets will be maintained/major bug fixes, the others may continue working on it, but I have no more interest in creating Twitter clients.
Why is it so personal?
For lack of a better cliché, I am MahTweets. I don’t mean to diminish the role or contributions of others, far from it, when I say I am MahTweets, I mean that I’ve poured a lot of myself into it, I’m the public face, I’m the "overlord", I started the project. For the others, it’s a pet project – for me, I’m disabled and unable to get a ‘real job’ – it’s as close to a job as I’ll have for a long time.
MahTweets is my twitter client of choice. Why? Well, I wrote it. Okay, that isn’t the only reason, it has some pretty awesome features distinguishing it from many Twitter clients.
Features
Inline media viewing View twitpic, flickr, direct images, and youtube (working on it, an IE8 update broke it) all inside MahTweets. Support will be expanded to support yfrog and any other services people request.
Webcam support Use your webcam to directly upload to twitpic (flickr, yfrog, and others coming later) or as your avatar on Twitter
Conversation viewing
Tracking This was common in the "old days" of Twitter, but now it seems to be called saved/inline searches? Either way, if you’re particular interested in tweets on a particular subject, track keywords using twitter search.
Filtering No more "#followfriday" clogging up my Twitter stream
Scalable UI Because MahTweets is coded in WPF, I can scale everything (not just change font sizes) neatly at a click of a button.
Short URL expansion Tired of being Rick Rolled through tinyurl, is.gd, bit.ly (and many others)? By auto-expanding the shortened url’s (using Long URL Please), you won’t be launched into sites you know are bad
Multi-account support & grouping Coming soon!
Tech Goodness (Requirements and other details)
.NET 3.5 SP1
Built with WPF, C#, using a modified WPFCap library,
Through Windows 7’s "XP Mode" I’ve tested Windows XP support, and even in the virtualised environment it was smooth – so smooth that it took me a good 10 minutes or so to notice I’d launched it in XP Mode instead of "natively"!1
Below is a screenshot of an earlier build, running XP Mode and Windows 7 "natively"1 the two running side by side.
My Demo’s Happen Here entry (entries closed last month) was on Visual Studio 2008, how it can rock your socks by creating Twitter clients in WPF and Silverlight.
For interests sake, the screencast was recorded using Microsoft’s Community Clips Recorder and edited with Windows Movie Maker – both free (well, providing you have Windows). Community Clips Recorder is fairly basic when you compare it against Camtasia, as it has no editing, zooming, or highlighting capabilities. However depending on the situation Camtasia is overly complex and the price difference is something to be considered.
