RefreshingApps.com

Reviewed Showcase App

DestroyTwitter

January 04th 2009 | by James

(98 votes, 4.2/5)

twitter

DestroyTwitter is the latest Adobe AIR application from developer Jonnie Hallman. His previous AIR application DestroyFlickr was previously reviewed here on RefreshingApps.com back in June last year, to much appraise.

Thankfully Jonnie has brough over some of the great UI touches and colour palettes from his previous AIR application over to DestroyTwitter.

DestroyTwitter commands a small footprint on the desktop just 320×480 pixels. The UI is clear and even though the typography appears to be smaller that other Twitter apps I find it to be perfectly readable.

There are screens (or canvases as they are referred to) for your main timeline, replies, saved (favourites) and search plus direct messaging and a sent items view, handy. 20 tweets are shown at a time with the most current at the top. You get the ability to view past tweets from your timeline using the options.

The mouse scroll wheel is supported and scrolls really well, sometimes it can be a bit jittery on AIR applications.

Hovering over a tweet, you get the options to save, reply and message (direct message in Twitter terminology). Clicking the senders Twitter name scrolls the UI down to the ‘People’ view, shown by the change in highlighted label.

Avatars are smartly cached, meaning no reloading when viewing many tweets from the same person.

The search option is nice and DestroyTwitter remembers your search terms upon re launch. Downside is that you can only have one search currently, unlike the multiple in TweetDeck. Also DestroyTwitter only supports one account currently.

For those on OS X you can press cmd + t to quickly open up the send tweet panel.

Video Review

DestroyTwitter Adobe AIR application review from RefreshingApps on Vimeo.

Design eye

The concept of workspaces and canvases carried over from DestroyFlickr works well in the Twitter application context. The smooth scroll between canvases adds some needed fluidity without too much UI friction.

The colour scheme works well as it is not overstated although the ability to add themes or change primary colour elements would be a great addition.

There are some well thoughout UI concepts going on here, an example is the double chevron after a tweet’s date and time indicating that is was in reply to. Clicking this loads the two tweets for that conversation and displays them on an overlay.

It’s a small thing but still nice is having both avatars displayed on your messages tweets.

Being non resizable could be an issue for people with larger desktops, although I found it not to be an issue.

Technical eye

The site was built using the Adobe Flex 3 IDE but as a pure ActionScript 3 project. It utilises and extensive custom display framework that enables dynamic asset creation entirely through code. And of course the fantastic Twitter API.

In Summary

It’s another take on the usual Twitter application but it’s definitely worth spending a bit of time checking this one out for size. It’s fast responsive and I like the little design touches that make a difference.

On the download page it would be useful to have the Adobe AIR install badge for seamless AIR application installation.

Your Comments and Views

Vanilla Cokehead said on January 04th 2009 at 2.02 pm

Quick initial thoughts: IMO it’s a promising little app. Here’s what I’d like to see on it:

1) Ability to resize the app window – it’s a tad small for my desktop, which is 1280 × 1024.

2) Option to change colors and fonts – the standard issue color scheme and fonts are a tad hard to read for a 40-something like myself.

3) Any chance to use the same API that the Adobe AIR app Toro uses? The API for Toro can make unlimited calls to Twitter.

I’m very impressed with it – with some work, it could be a formidable rival to Tweetdeck. Thanks for all the effort on this one. :)

James said on January 04th 2009 at 3.41 pm

The app does use the same Twitter API, there is only one. It’s Twitter that set’s the rate limit on calls you can make using it’s API. It’s currently 100 requests in a 60 minute period.

Thanks for your comments.

William Dowell said on January 04th 2009 at 8.02 pm

I love it! I loved DestroyFlickr, and this is a great refreshing start to a twitter client that looks good and clever – can’t wait to see what he does with it as it matures.

Vanilla Cokehead said on January 05th 2009 at 4.56 am

@James, thanks for the quick reply on this. Still been using DestroyTwitter (DT) since the last post – and I’m even more impressed with it than earlier.

Appreciate the clarification on the interaction with the API; I was referring to how Toro says in its UI that it has “unlimited” API calls.

DT has many of the different views that TweetDeck has – and seems to use less memory than TweetDeck and seems zippier. I also like being able to see the running count of API calls remaining in an hour period and when the period ends. Visual effects are sweet, too.

Once again, nice work – and thanks for the effort. :)

James said on January 15th 2009 at 8.39 am

There are some big changes going on with Destroy Twitter. The latest version has lots of additional functionality including: resizing windows, drag and drop twitpic integration, bigger text preference and some smart new click scrolling.

So check it out and get updatin’ folks!

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