Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [60]
For smaller companies or independent developers, particularly those that are writing lightweight applications, coding two (or three) versions of the same application can be a huge investment of time. Enter Adobe Air.
Adobe Air is a piece of software you install on your computer that lets you run applications built for the Adobe Air set of standards. Like the programming language Java, Adobe Air aims for the “write once, run everywhere” ideal. That means developers can reach a larger potential audience than if they had to re-create their product over and over to work on different platforms. Many Twitter third-party desktop applications (notably, TweetDeck and Twhirl) are written for Adobe Air. Some software developers actually joke that the main reason to learn to program for Adobe Air is to build a new Twitter client.
Because these applications run on any machine that can run Adobe Air, they function exactly the same across platforms. Anyone who has tried to jump from using Microsoft Word on a Mac to using Microsoft Word on a PC (or vice-versa) can appreciate the beauty of this. Because of Adobe Air’s ease of distribution and networking features, programmers often write desktop-based social-networking and messaging clients for Adobe Air.
Installing Adobe Air is not that hard — often, if you try to install an application that requires it, you’re instructed to install Adobe Air first. It may even automatically download itself and install on your computer if you give it permission. Just follow the onscreen instructions or go to www.adobe.com/products/air/.
Spaz (www.funkatron.com/spaz): A newer Twitter desktop client (shown in Figure 9-7). It’s an Adobe Air app that offers many of the same features that Twhirl and TweetDeck do, but Spaz has these added bonuses:
• Skinnable: You can customize Spaz by applying what techies call skins, frequently by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Skins change the look and feel of the application. Creating and sharing custom skins is a popular thing for programmers to do. Don’t worry too much about what this means to you; it just means more choices and options if you want them.
• Open source: You may have heard the term open-source software and wondered what it meant. Open-source software just means that the code underlying the application is shared with others so that other developers can change it to create new features, build applications for it, or otherwise improve upon it. The makers of Spaz have opened its code to the masses so that developers can change it to fit their needs.
Figure 9-7: You can customize the desktop client Spaz.
Twitterrific (www.twitterrific.com): A Twitter client made for the Mac OS X desktop operating system, with mobile versions for Apple’s iPhone or iPod Touch available in the iTunes App Store. Twitterrific is shareware: You can download a free version, but if you choose to support the developers by purchasing the application, you’ll avoid the ads on the regular version, and it costs less than $15. And many people swear by Twitterrific’s interface and customer service. Twitterrific has the standard gorgeous and streamlined interface most often associated with Macs (as shown in Figure 9-8), as well as the ability to manage more than one Twitter account. But, unlike many other Twitter clients, you can’t track other social networks within its interface.
Digsby (www.digsby.com): A Windows-only desktop client that combines together many instant-messaging, e-mail, and social-networking accounts, in addition to Twitter — Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, AIM, and Yahoo!, to name a few. Figure 9-9 shows the Digsby home page. A version is in the works for the Mac operating system, but it has yet to be released as of this writing. The interface is similar to a universal instant-messaging client such as Pidgin (www.pidgin.im) or Trillian (www.ceruleanstudios.com), but Digsby