DestroyTwitter and Improve Your Efficiency

A while ago I wrote a review of Tweet Deck, one of the many Twitter desk top applications that help you manage the enormous flow of information more effectively.

I liked Tweet Deck a lot, especially the ability to create groups so you can follow particular people more closely.

But one of the things that was missing was the ability to see what people were replying to.

In order to do that I had to run the web version of Twitter and go check my updates stream each time I didn’t remember what message a reply was referring to.

Now I’ve found a solution.  

DestroyTwitter.

DestroyTwitter runs on the Adobe Air platform (same as Tweet Deck), so installing it was a breeze.  This also makes it usable on Mac as well as PC.

Firing it up initially opened it into a small window. There’s a setting in the preferences for it to operate in a wide window, but you only have those two settings (narrow and wide).

You can’t even grab the side of the window and drag it wider.

There are 6 panes: Home, Replies, Messages, Search, Saved and Sent, and they are displayed on 2 screens – 3 panes on each. The menu bar across the top is where you select what pane you want to see.

See a full sized screenshot.

I was disappointed with the display initially, even though you can select a larger font size – necessary for my ageing eyesight! But they just released a new version on which the display is greatly enhanced.

It’s now easier to see un-read tweets, although this could still be improved further.

Also, an intermittent glitch where clicking the system tray icon sometimes didn’t display the DT screen has been fixed.

The big bonus for me with DestroyTwitter, though, is the ability to click a link and display the previous message.

The ‘previous’ message also offers the same link and functionality, so you can display the message before that if you need to.

So now I can easily check what messages people are replying to. Especially useful if I wrote the original message some time ago.

The preferences panel offers quite a wide range of options for managing alerts, setting update frequency (useful for managing your API calls), editing your Twitter profile, displaying users’ full names, reading tweets on hover and support for international characters.  Plus quite a bit more.

So how do I like DestroyTwitter and how does it compare to Tweet Deck?

For me they’re pretty much of a muchness – and they’re both good.

There are things I prefer about Tweet Deck, but I use DestroyTwitter as my first choice simply because of that ability to trace back the thread of messages and see what people are replying to.

It means I can do everything Twitter-related in DestroyTwitter, without also having to run the web version.

Filed in: Twitter

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