A Twitter Client

So last night I came to the realization that I didn't like *any* of the Twitter clients for Mac OS X, but instead of accepting the 'grin and bear it' mentality, I decided to write my own. "What would an ideal Twitter client be for me", I wondered. I shortly realized that I already had one, on my iPhone! Twinkle is what I've been using for the past few months, and I absolutely love the minimal but pretty UI it had. If I was going to go ahead and make a desktop client, I wanted it to look similar to Twinkle. An hour later, and I had this all up and running using Matt Gemmell's MGTwitterEngine: Sure, not bad for a first start, but not yet what I wanted. I had decided to use the WebKit rendering engine for the app's UI, as it allowed really quick layout and design with maximum extensibility. But I soon knew I wanted more than the default WebKit gives, so I investigated the WebKit nightlies mainly for their gradient support. Very soon, I had an app with an embedded nightly WebKit (after a big of install_name_tool hacking!), and extended the design until it looked like this: As expected, links and usernames are clickable and will open up in Safari; using HTML, CSS and JavaScript I'm able to make some very nice effects and I use the WebScriptObject methods to allow my WebKit-rendered UI to interact fully with the application code, allowing the user to click on any tweet to start an @reply to said tweet. What I have to sort out next is direct messaging, and image uploading support (uploading directly to TwitPic from the app). Anyway, that's just a quick glimpse as to what I'm working on; I haven't decided whether I will release this or not yet, but I've had a significant number of requests, so I'll look into it. Until then, pretty pictures will have to do! =]