Lately is seems as though we have native Twitter clients tweeting out of our ears, with the chirp of Twitim, a GTK twitter client for the GNOME desktop, being the latest.

There’s the awesome ‘tweetdeck’ style Gwibber; the gorgeous Pino‘ powerful Choqok; the fun of Qwit; and forerunners in Twittux and gTwitter. And thats without touching on Adobe Air apps, many of which run flawlessly on Ubuntu!

So does Twitim bring something new to the deck or is it just yet-another-twitter-client?

Bottoms up

The first thing you’ll notice when using Twitim is that it displays new tweets at the bottom. Yes – at the bottom. This lead me to reading old tweets for a good 10 minutes before i realised!

Thankfully this is easily reversible in the preferences, just check the “Reverse timeline order” option.

Tabtastic

Filter views (@replies, direct messages, etc) are displayed using separate ‘tabs’.

By default Twitum displays one tab – ‘Timeline’. Adding other tabs is a snap via File > Open Tab > option. You can choose between Replies, Direct Messages, Favourite Tweets, see a timeline of tweets from those you’re following or even tweets from those who are following you!

Watchlists

Twitim allows you to create ‘watchlists’ in a custom tab according to rules you set out. The tweets you see follow the parameters you set; choose to see tweets from certain people or with certain keywords – or both!

Other features

You can insert a ‘mark’ – useful for times when you’re nipping away to grab a cup of pure caffeine and want to know what you’ve missed in the intervening time.

Another ‘feature’ (using the term loosely this time) is the resizeable entry field. Some applications have this locked, which can really annoy if not everything fits in. Here you can resize it to your hearts content.

#Hastags and @names are all hyperlinks that open up in your browser.

Fonts are customizable and default to your ‘system’ font and you can even set a custom sound to play on receipt of a new tweet!

Iconless

Twitim does not come with an application icon. No, seriously, it doens’t! It’s easy to add one though – just pop your image files in /etc/twitim/ or specify them via the preferences menu.

XMPP

A unique selling point of Twitim is that it supports XMPP connections. I’ve chosen to not to touch on this for the reason I can’t get the blasted thing to enable! If you install Twitim and get XMPP to work – it’d be awesome if someone could write a little paragraph and chuck in some screenshots for me to add to the post!

Download

You can download the latest release in an easy-install .deb file @ tsurukawa.org/debian/squeeze/twitim_1.4.2-1_all.deb