Seesmic Desktop Now Has A Spellchecker; TweetDeck’s Tragedy Is (Almost) Complete
Long-term readers of this blog will recall that I have repeatedly sung the praises of TweetDeck, and it’s certainly true that this Twitter client has significantly improved the way a lot of us interact and engage with our networks.
However, a few weeks back TweetDeck started giving me a lot of problems. Specifically, my groups, which I set up to closely monitor my favourite Twitterers, were acting all kinds of crazy. Some accounts – including big guns like @Mashable, @Wired and @NYTimes – stopped showing up completely (not just in groups), and it got to a point where it was almost unusable. It’s a shame, as the rest of the functionality, and the robustness of TweetDeck itself, continues to appeal. There’s no doubt that TweetDeck set the benchmark for what could be done, and I’m sure that they’ll continue to make improvements to the product with each release.
About six weeks ago, I reviewed Seesmic Desktop. At that time, Desktop had several large bugs that meant it wasn’t a viable alternative to TweetDeck for me, even though I liked a lot of the other features.
Since then, Seesmic Desktop has gone through a few major upgrades, and I started testing it again during version 0.2, and really liked what I saw. The groups (called ‘userlists’) function is far easier to manage and administer than it ever was on TweetDeck, which even when it was working had some irritating glitches, and many ‘power-users’ have stated that groups stop working entirely above a certain number of users (about five thousand, I believe).
Meantime, adding and removing accounts from userlists on Seesmic is a very simple process.
And get this: you can add users to your groups even if you’re not following them. How’s that for being able to optimise your feed?
Running multiple groups is also a breeze in SD, and I now have my client set up with separate userlists for professional contacts, friends, and so on.
SD also supports multiple user accounts – I only have one, but others like to separate the professional and the personal – and the search panes within the app work the same way as in TweetDeck, so you have that full functionality, too, which helps you limit API calls.
Version 0.2.1 was released earlier today, and with it are a bunch of exciting new features, including, most importantly for me (and lots of other folk), a spell-checker! This was, I think, the only aspect of TweetDeck that I really missed. I mean, I’m a fairly decent writer but we all make mistakes, and I’ve noticed that my typos have gone up considerably since I switched to Seesmic. Not, as they say, no more.
Well, not quite – the spell-checker currently supports US English only, so it’s not a great option for everybody. I imagine other languages will be available in the future, and for me it’s very easy to right-mouse click and add any words I know are spelled correctly to the built-in dictionary.
Other improvements from version 0.2:
- Ability to view and enter comments into Facebook
- Now supporting pikchur and yfrog to share images on Twitter
- Added spam reporting feature to help send spam warnings to Twitter’s @spam account
- Ability to block users who are following you on Twitter
- Ability to use Tweetshrink before sending messages (see http://tweetshrink.com/about)
- Access to view favorites within your Twitter account timeline
- Improved profile enhancements (added follow/unfollow within a profile along with the ability to reply and direct message)
- Option to start Seesmic Desktop at login
- Verification dialog box upon deletions of Userlists, Searches
- For OSX: Added standard buttons for OSX and improved idle CPU usage
- Displayed version information in update tab
If you’re a fan of TweetDeck – and certainly if your Twitter experience is limited to Twitter.com – I strongly urge you to check out the new and very, very much improved Seesmic Desktop.
Direct Download: http://d.seesmic.com/seesmic/SeesmicDesktop-0.2.1.air
(Requires Adobe AIR. Works on Windows, OSX, Linux.)
This week, I’m planning to do a video review of the new Seesmic Desktop to show off a few other tips and tricks, as well as revealing how I set up the software to fully engage and manage both the people I follow, and the folk who are kind enough to follow me. Watch my timeline for news! 
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Loading ...
I’ll look forward to trying out the latest update of Seesmic Desktop. It seems to have been substantially improved since I last gave it a spin.
For what it’s worth, my TweetDeck (Vista/0.25b) is spell-checking for me. Spelling errors are underlined with a dotted red line and right-clicking brings up a context-sensitive menu.
Yeah, TD always (I think) had a spell-checker; as I said in the piece, that was the aspect that I missed the most when I made the switch.
Now that Seesmic has that, I think it might well be the only item previously missing that might have prevented TweetDeck fans from moving over. Not no more.
Oops, misread that part! Thought you meant you missed it because it wasn’t there in the first place. (Oddly enough, I searched around elsewhere to make sure I wasn’t imagining TweetDeck’s spellchecking and found a few people who still think it’s not there in the current version!)
One thing that’s preventing me from using Seesmic at the moment is its rather laborious way of adding users to a userlist. At the moment, you have to go to your Home column and click on each user’s avatar in turn to select the add option.
This problem’s compounded by the fact that the Home column will only show about 200 recent tweets, which limits the number of people you can add to userlists off the bat. (I.e., out of the 400 odd people I follow, only about 30-40 may be represented in that chunk of 200 tweets.) From there on, you’re playing a waiting game, hoping to catch other people’s tweets in order to add them to a userlist.
TweetDeck at least allows you to create a group, then scroll through a list of all your follows and check-box all those you want to add to that list. It’s still not an ideal method, given that the list takes a while to propagate itself with recent follows, but it at least allows you to quickly set up basic groups without having to wait for people to turn up in your timeline.
When I mentioned this on Twitter, someone from the Seesmic team quickly responded to acknowledge the problem and say they’re looking at new userlist management options for future upgrades, so that’s encouraging.
The only other issues I’ve encountered seem to be GUI related. When I put Seesmic in fullscreen mode, it seems to chop off about 8-10 pixels on the left, top and right borders. This happens on my 1280×800 laptop and 1680×1050 desktop PCs (both running Vista with a vanilla desktop theme).
Also, clicking the save button on a userlist, when nothing’s been changed, brings up a pop-up “error” box saying there’s nothing to save. This is a bit counter intuitive to the way every other Vista application behaves.
Still, it’s early days for Seesmic and I’ll still check in on it each update to see what they’ve added or ironed out. It has the makings of an excellent application, but TweetDeck (despite its own faults) seems to be the more polished at the moment.
Mark, Seesmic has a built-in ‘look-up’ feature that allows you to quickly search the profile details of anybody on Twitter, and add them to your list of choice with a couple of clicks.
It’s a really simple process. You don’t have to wait for people to enter your home stream. I’d agree that if that was the case, it would be lousy – but it isn’t.
(Hint: If your Seesmic home pane doesn’t look like mine, with the tabs at the bottom, click on your username under ‘accounts’. It should transform to the tabbed pane.)
Also, mark my words – when you get close to or above 1000 follows on TweetDeck the groups functionality will start to breakdown. As I said, several people I was following started to disappear entirely from my TweetDeck stream (not just groups). I only realised because I noticed someone in my network re-tweeting someone else I followed, and I thought, “Hey, how did I miss that?” Turned out I didn’t miss it; it simply wasn’t there. That has never happened with Seesmic.
Also, groups in TD become unruly when you get to around 1000 followers. They can take 5-10 minutes to load up, completely locking up TweetDeck until they’re operational, and in my experience contained dozens and dozens of people that I had long since unfollowed. And scrolling through a thousand people feels like a time-warp back to Windows 3.1.
When you create a new userlist in Seesmic, it saves as soon as you click OK. You can then easily add people using the look-up feature.
Also, as I said, one great aspect of Seesmic is the look-up allows you to add people to lists you aren’t even following. That’s great for optimizing your network experience.
I can’t comment on your GUI experience but on my 10-inch Samsung netbook it runs perfectly!
Did you install the latest version? If you’re still using the earlier releases it might be why you’re having some of these issues. Comes highly recommended!
I’ve been using Seesmic Desktop about %50 of the time when I’m not using Tweetdeck. Like you it was groups that pulled me over. I follow over 20,000 people so a functional groups feature is a must have. I segment my groups mostly by fields of expertise programmers, web designers, bloggers, that kind of thing.
Two major changes that Seesmic Desktop has to do to get my undivided attention are:
1. Add filters to columns like TD
2. The ability to see trends emerging on twitter like Tweetdeck’s Twitscoop importation. The ability to see news as it happens is one of the coolest things about Twitter, am I right?
Minor Annoyances Seesmic could fix:
1.The UI is pretty clumsy I mean can’t they put an X on the spot I need to click to close a column? I think I have it down now but it took me a bit just to figure how they wanted me to navigate.
2. I don’t want to click to open a box so that I can add a shortened URL. It’s one extra thing I didn’t have to do in TD.
3. I’m sure there are others but I my son is in serious need of a bike ride.
All in all it’s been fun to watch Seesmic Desktop develop. Loic Le Meur and his staff are very responsive to constructive criticism and I’m sure they’ll address most if not all of these issues in time.
Jesse Newhart’s last blog post..What Jack Kerouac Can Teach You About Content Creation
Yeah, I agree completely about the filters and a simple X button – all that detach stuff is a bit confusing for many, I think – and I also used to like to keep an eye on TwitScoop. To be honest, TweetDeck’s filters, while useful (as per your guidelines in your video tutorial) would have been a lot better if a level of permanency could be applied.
I used to tab down to the shorten URL box in TD, too, but that’s something that I’ve gotten used to very quickly in SD.
Of course, anyone with enough oomph on their machine could reasonably happily run SD and TD at the same time, although I think that the API calls would be doubled as a result (I believe it’s per user, and not per-user-per-client).
The spell-checker was a major issue for me, but I’d also like to see permanent filters on SD as I proposed above. I think a lot of people want that, and I imagine it’s going to be pop up on TweetDeck or SD soon enough.
That’s the good part – these guys are suddenly a bit like Microsoft and Apple, and will hopefully keep pushing each other forward. If TD sorts out their group issues and adds a few purple cows, I’ll be happy to load it up again.
Enjoy the bike ride!
It’s funny because I have changed to Seesmic Desktop for the same exact reason; certain folks completely disappeared from my group. What’s the point of having a special group to follow and not seeing updates that interest you?
I also had a search setup for my twitter username and it stopped updating for about a week before I changed. Unfortunately for TweetDeck, as much as I enjoyed using it I have no patience for the bugs.
Juscelino M. Acevedo’s last blog post..Clean Infected Computers With Malwarebytes [Digg]
Indeed. I was a huge TweetDeck supporter but when you’ve got hundreds of tweets not appearing from key members of my network, it ceases to become a viable option.
Okay, using the user search function made it easier to add people to a userlist, but I found a major flaw when it comes to adding users in bulk.
For starters, the amount of clicking around is quite high. For example, compare these two processes for bulk adding in Seesmic and TweetDeck:
Seesmic:
1) Click on account in left-hand pane.
2) Enter user name in search box and hit return.
3) Wait for column to populate with tweets.
4) Click on user options icon.
5) Click on “add to userlist” option.
6) Click on OK button (hitting return doesn’t work).
7) Repeat steps 2-6 for all users.
TweetDeck:
1) Click on Group header.
2) Click the check box next to the name of the person on your follow list.
3) Repeat step 2 for all users.
4) Click Save Group button.
Now, bear in mind I follow about 200+ games on Twitter. For Seesmic, I have to type 200 names, wait 200 times for the column to populate with search results, then click a further 600 times. That’s a lot of typing, waiting and clicking!
For TweetDeck, I’m only clicking 200 times, once for each person I’m adding, then one more click to save the group.
Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it.
For the Seesmic method, you use up 2 API calls per search and (for some bizarre reason) 1 API call per “add to userlist” click. I’d barely added 30 users to my Gaming userlist when I’d ran out of API processes, resulting in a 50 minute wait until I could start adding another 30 users. You can imagine how long it would take to add 200 users (and that’s just half the people I’m following).
For the Tweetdeck method, you use up 1 API call regardless of how many users you’re adding.
Admittedly, once you’ve added users in bulk, you’ll have little reason to do so again (unless you need to do a fresh installation of either application), so this is a once time only aggravation. However, it’s a lot less painful in TweetDeck (3 minutes of work, 1 API call) than it is in Seesmic (6 hours of work, 600 API calls) to add 200 users to a list.
Once you’re over that ordeal, the process is easier in Seesmic, seeing as you can quickly add a user to a list regardless of whether or not you’re following them. In TweetDeck, you have to wait for your list of follows to be refreshed, which seems to occur rather arbitrarily.
I must admit to being a bit anal where groups/userlists are concerned and have an urge to assign every person I’m following to a group/userlist. To get all 400+ people I follow into userlists on Seesmic will cost me 1200+ API calls and 12+ hours of waiting around, so I’m probably better off falling back on the “add users to userlists as and when they appear in my timeline” method.
Or stick with TweetDeck until Seesmic come up with a more user-friendly method of bulk-adding that doesn’t eat up API calls at such an alarming rate.
Note: My method for working out the number of API calls Seesmic used was to monitor the number of API calls available in TweetDeck (with updates turned off). Hitting refresh in TweetDeck costs 1 API call. Conducting a user search in Seesmic then checking my remaining API calls in Tweetdeck revealed 2 additional API calls had been used. Conducting a user search in Seesmic, then adding a user to a list, resulted in 3 additional API calls being used. I’m sure there’s a more accurate method for calculating Seesmic’s API usage, but the current results seem on the nose.
I don’t understand this at all.
I’ve yet to run out of API in Seesmic, even once. It’s never happened. I have my API settings at 2 minutes, 2 minutes, 3 minutes for Tweets, Replies and DMs respectively.
When you say ‘search box’, you’re not using the search in the top-right hand corner, right? The look-up feature built into the pane means typing in the name, then left-mouse click and ‘add to list’. 12 hours of waiting around!? I added about 100 people to lists in about two minutes, and didn’t run out of API at all! After this, whenever somebody new comes along I want to add to my userlist(s), it’s a very simple process – I either look them up or right-mouse click and add.
Again, the main point here is the unreliability of TD above a certain number of follows/followers. It just fell apart for me (and others), and the group edit becomes a nightmare when you have more than a thousand people on there, many of whom you long since unfollowed. It’s a case of each to their own, I guess – I’m sticking with Seesmic.
(Note: I edited this comment on May 24 as I gaffed and put right-mouse click, instead of left.)
I don’t run out of API calls in basic, everyday Seesmic use (i.e., just reading, tweeting and doing the odd search), but I do run out of API calls when adding people to userlists in bulk.
I’m not using the top-right search box. I used the method you showed me, by clicking on the lookup button at the bottom-right of the account column, then typing the name into the search box there.
This morning, I did a fresh install of AIR and Seesmic 0.21 on Vista/32 just to be sure, but the same thing happened.
I’m assuming Seesmic limits your API calls to up to 100 per hour like most other Twitter apps. Once again, looking up a user via lookup costs 2 API calls per user and 1 API call when you “add to userlist”.
I spent a few minutes adding approx. 30 users to a userlist, at which point I ran out of API calls and now have to wait 50 odd minutes until my API limit is reset.
They way the API limit manifests itself in Seesmic (seeing as there’s no on-screen API counter) is simply that an API call returns no data. There’s no error message. In the case of searching for a user via lookup, the search results remain empty. I thought I’d hit a bug at first, because I was looking up users I knew existed, but it didn’t display any results. It was only then that I discovered, via other apps, that I had zero API calls remaining.
I’m not sure how you managed to add 100 users (I assume this was within a 1 hour timeframe) without running out of API calls. That would have used up 300 API calls, going well beyond the 100/hour limit.
One thing you did mention is that you were able to right-click on a user and add them to a user-list from the right-click menu. Unfortunately, this is what my right-click menu looks like:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12743867@N08/3559548911/
It seems as if other Vista/Windows 7 users are experiencing the same thing, so I’m not alone.
I’m not sure what’s supposed to be in this menu. If there’s an “add to userlist” option there, it may well be one that doesn’t an extra API call.
Also, take note of the top and left borders of that image. That’s not a crop. That’s how Seesmic actually appears when fullscreen. Again, other Vista users have noted this. Someone with a multiple monitor setup actually noted that the app “spills” over into a second monitor when fullscreen in the other.
In all other respects Seesmic looks great and I’d very likely use it over TweetDeck. I just seem to be hitting this API call problem which only lets me assign ~30 users to a userlist, within an hour, before I run out of API calls.
If you’re just adding a few users to a user list each hour and otherwise doing basic Twitter stuff in Seesmic, then it’s very unlikely that you’d ever hit the API limit. It’s just the quick, bulk userlist additions that are the problem.
Looking at your image it’s clear there’s something wrong with your Seesmic install. You’ve installed again so I’m not sure what the issue is, but it’s possibly Vista as you say (I use XP on my netbook, as does my wife on her laptop – I’ve never seen it running on Vista, although I’ve heard of no issues).
Seesmic actually limits you to a maximum of 80 API calls/hour – not the 100 Twitter allocates (and TweetDeck uses), so theoretically it should be easier to run out faster, but it’s never happened to me, even once, as said. Happened all the time on TweetDeck, certainly until I started searching for replies (and switched @replies off).
As for the menu – sorry, it’s a LEFT-click, not right (brain spaz) on the extras icon, and here’s what it should look like:
Right-click doesn’t do anything for me at all, so I can understand why what I said was very confusing.
My advice is to set Seesmic up, even if running out of API – and one way to get around this would be to put all calls to zero in your settings while you’re doing configuration – and once that’s done, it’s done. Then it’ll be a case of adding users one at a time, which shouldn’t mean you have any kind of API issue in the future.
Yep, I see the same menu as you when left-clicking on the extras icon. The “null” menu appears when right-clicking somewhere in a user’s tweet (but not on any names/links).
I noticed when there are multiple @users within a tweet, the right-click menu brings up several sub-menus for each user, each with their own null options. I’m guessing we should be seeing similar options to the extras menu.
Searching around reveals that the null problem only seems to be affecting Vista/Windows 7 users.
Anyway, I’m nearing the end of my userlist configuration marathon, so I’m looking forward to just sitting back and using Seesmic without any API conundrums!
Thanks for taking your time to respond to these issues.
Mark’s last blog post..Links to the Past for March 8th, 2009
No problem at all Mark. If’s useful information if Seesmic is glitchy on Vista/W7, as I can pass the knowledge from your experience(s) on to other users. Cheers!
As for how you’re able to add 100+ users to a list in under an hour, without hitting the API limit, there’s a couple of possibilities:
1) You had Seesmic open long enough that it cached a lot of data. Seesmic may possibly search cached data and thus bypass API calls in some situations.
2) Your Twitter account has a higher API limit than mine.
Mark’s last blog post..Links to the Past for March 8th, 2009
Even if API is a problem when you first add users, surely that’s a one-time job? Every time you switch to a new piece of software there’s a fair amount of configuration to do, getting it all set up to your liking, etc.
There’s no way I have higher API than anybody else. Be nice if it was true, can’t see any reason why it would be.
Bottom line? If TD is better for you then that’s all that really matters. If I was getting $50 for each person I ‘sold’ on SD, I’d push a lot harder, but it works really well for my needs, and I’d recommend it to everybody else, too – certainly those still on Twitter.com.
Oh, I totally agree. Like I said in my second reply, I’m probably an extreme example when it comes to wanting to having all my follows neatly listed and it is only a one-time deal.
I was just a bit concerned that a few people have said they’re able to add HUNDREDS of users in a few minutes (using the lookup method) without hitting the API limit. I’m genuinely more interested in how they’re able to do it than the fact that I can’t!
Maybe you were on to something about me having a different level of API to you, but you had it backward: I’m at the standard 100 calls/hour, but Twitter put you down to 10. I told you hitting on @Biz’ girlfriend wasn’t going to work out.
A couple of things I’d like to see added to SD are a proper English dictionary. I’d also like the ability to open profiles in the browser rather than in SD(which @askseesmic tell me they’re gonna do)
I’d also like them to implement u.nu url shortening and tweetphoto image uploads, both simple APIs and would extend functionality to those who prefer those services(yes there are many similar URL shorteners and piccy uploaders – why not add them all!)
Also lets have those nulls filled in with actual words!
Nevertheless, it’s now my main client over tweetdeck.
billythekid’s last blog post..Yes I Can