This week I installed a preview version of the native Twitter application, Seesmic for Windows. It combines a fully functional Twitter integration directly in the Windows environment.

seesmic-windows

It was funny to see how much attention a simple Twitter application still can get. I felt it to be overhyped! It got presented on Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), during Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote. What? It’s a Twitter application, nothing more. It is a more or less feature complete application, I’ll give the developers that much. First of all, I don’t like that the installer bypasses the UAC. No administrator password is needed to install the Seesmic. First I thought that this could be yet another AIR application, but it’s not. There excists an AIR version of the Twitter client as well. By bypassing UAC, the application gets installed in user profiles instead of under Program Files. A nightmare for system administrators.

I find it almost unbelievable to read:

Microsoft has provided great support to help us get started on the Microsoft platform. I would just like to thank the team who has been working with us to make it possible for us to deliver a product in such a short period of time

I hope they will help you to work with UAC and not against it, as you have done so far.

Another problem I have with the client, is the horrible “font rendering” this preview release has. This is not a sleek and smooth user interface. I have tried it both on my 12″ laptop and my desktop computer with a 24″ screen. Both computers running Windows 7. I guess the tweets are rendered as images, and therefor the text is blur. For the same reason you can’t cut and paste text from tweets. The Seesmic preview is someting I simply don’t want to use or recommend to my readers.

The idea of having social services as native desktop application is great. This let you use drag and drop to add user lists, and gives you an increased performance, with easier and faster navigation through tab views. Native applications compared to AIR applications use less memory, and they utilize more Windows 7 features (e.g. location sensor).

I realize that this is a quite negative review, I have only written about the things that I find bad in this client. For a more positive review, please read WEB WORKER DAILY’s Seesmic for Windows: An AIR-less Twitter Client.