I think I tried to hard on that subject line.

Anyone who uses twitter knows that they've had technical difficulties lately. This is fine with me, since I don't pay for the service, and I can't even begin to fathom how large their database infrastructure must be to handle the traffic they handle. Anyway, the XMPP/IM service into twitter has been down for a few days, and that was my primary way of using twitter, since I can't keep up on my phone, and don't have the patience for reloading the webpage constantly.

@zen_jewitch recommended that I try twhirl. Officially, Adobe AIR, doesn't have Linux support, but they DO have an alpha release, and it seems to work just fine.

The AIR installation went smoothly on both Fedora 5 and Fedora 8. The thwirl installation was even easier, since AIR handled it, and it also put everything neatly into /opt, which pleases me.

So, what do I think of twhirl? I like it. It's not taking up too many cycles on my old hardware (2x 800Mhz Coppermines on my Fedora 5 workstation), and it's pretty handy as far as organizing twitter information goes. The only g-glitch that I've noticed, is that it picks up my keyboard shortcuts I use to switch from desktop-to-desktop in Gnome. I use C-M-left and C-M-right a lot to get around, and C-left and C-right affect which pane is active in thwirl. If there's a way to disable or configure this, I'd love to know it. ;-)

I have nothing really bad to say about it. I do miss my XMPP connectivity, though.

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