@tweetie’s expiration date
February 25, 2010
i’m a big believer in brand loyalty, especially when it comes to software and hardware components that retain a place in my daily life. for a very long time now, i’ve been one of Tweetie’s biggest supporters. Tweetie, of course, is a twitter client, one of a virtual plethora of twitter clients available for purchase on the iPhone. it made its distinction by being one of the simplest, pretty twitter apps. but Tweetie also has a desktop “big brother” that looks and acts much in the same way as its iPhone counterpart.
problem is, while the iPhone version received a major upgrade in the latter part of 2009, the desktop version hasn’t been touched in what feels like ages.
i was such a believer in the Tweetie app that on the day of its desktop release, i purchased a license. while not a requirement at all, i felt that the developer deserved some small pittance for his hard work in developing the software. but now its aging, and aging badly.
desktop apps like TweetDeck have long since surpassed it in functionality and features, including in-app video playback, support for the ever-growing amount of twitter picture services, and the almighty “new retweet.” there are the other features, like a direct connection to facebook, giving you an up to the minute insight on what’s up on your news feed (although that can get tiresome real quick; i can live without it). Tweetie for the desktop is way way way way behind; it doesn’t even support the new style retweeting system.
problem is, there seems to be little to no movement on the part of the developer to update anytime soon. hell, the iPhone app hasn’t seen an update since late November, although in all fairness: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and for me it ain’t broke.
so i’ve been using TweetDeck for almost two weeks, and you know what? i hate it. in the same way the Apple software Color looks completely un-Apple like, TD feels the same way. i’ve tried reconfiguring and changing color sets and everything else; it just doesn’t feel right. ever. and of course, no line breaks. so now i’m back on Tweetie because it does feel absolutely right, but it feels like cheating at the same time. i’d decided to leave Tweetie because of the developer’s seeming unwillingness to update, but it does what it does perfectly and dammit, its hard to leave that behind.
at the end of it all, i feel weird complaining about a piece of software that connects to a social media outlet. it ultimately is silly, but i think the other end of that is, “hey, i paid some money to encourage further development and future updates, and it seems you’ve taken the money and run.” many of you reading this won’t care, but i know there are some of you who get what i’m saying and i want your opinion: is it ok to feel betrayed by a developer when they just give up on updating their product, especially when you paid money for it when you didn’t have to? or is it completely within a developer’s rights to not feel compelled to continue… developing… when they’ve made their stack of cash?
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1) Whoa… style change on the blog.2) I subscribe to brand loyalty, as well. I’ve paid for a WinRAR license back in July 2000, and the registry key STILL works on all the newest versions.
And after years of using a cracked version of mIRC, I finally broke down and paid for that one a while back.As for software falling out of favor with me, that was Trillian. That was my chat messenger of choice, but it just was never updated while the programmers worked on Astra. After a few years or no updates, I finally gave up. Astra finally was released, but I had moved on to Pidgin and now I’m settled in pretty well there.I guess I will never really be a “power” tweeter. I’m pretty happy with the Chromed Bird extension for Chrome, and the Opera Twitter widget. There are a few things I wish I could change or add in terms of functionality, but each work well enough for me.I really wish I knew how to program Android apps, because I’m not really happy with any of the Twitter apps. Twidroid is probably the best, but it’s kind of big and bulky. Swift, Seesmic, and Motoblur are all find and dandy, but don’t have nick autocomplete, which is a must for me.Oh, well. Long comment is long.
well, considering i work for a software company… i would be quite angry if a piece of software didnt get an adequate upgrade/update to stay competitive in such a ridiculous market. if we didnt update our features to our software, peeps would be rather upset at us. especially if we didnt fix bugs as well. so, im hoping that either tweetdeck will polish their app a little more, OR, something better than both TD and Tweetie will come out. i personally do not like tweet deck on the pc, although, after tinkering with the iphone version, its not half bad, but it does not compare to how good tweetie for iPhone is.