Twittering with friends seems to be the new “thing-to-do” on the web these days. Many bloggers are using it and it has even made its way into an episode of CSI! So what exactly is Twitter you ask? Twitter is an online web service that lets you post what you are doing – in 140 characters or less – in which those who are “following” can track what you’re doing based on what you post. Bloggers sometimes also use Twitter to share URLs and to share quick thoughts on a variety of topics.
Now I said that Twitter was a web service right? Well the Twitter developers have released an API in which developers can use to create “Twitter clients” to be used outside the web browser.
Alan Le, from the company Vertigo, has utilized the Twitter API and designed a WPF Twitter client called Witty that extends the Twitter experience into Windows Vista. If you recall, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is built in to Windows Vista.
I also blogged about another awesome product from the Vertigo folks back in August called Family.Show. Family.Show is a WPF app used in tracking family history and creating a family tree.
With Witty, I can quickly receive updates from people I am following as well as quickly post on what I’m doing (or any specific thought quickly I might have) quickly as the app nicely sits on my notification area of my taskbar.
Download: Witty 0.1.5 (986Kb)
To install Witty, just download the .zip file (above) and extract to a folder on your PC. Once the files are extracted, open the folder the files were extracted to and double click on Witty.exe. Feel free to follow me! You cal also follow the Windows Vista Team Blog on Twitter as well – which will update whenever a new post is made here on the blog.
Please note that the latest version of Witty released is 0.1.5 – which is what I recommend you use. My screenshots reflect 0.1.6 but it is an early alpha (pre-beta) version of Witty I am helping test out for Alan. For future versions of Witty, feel free to leave comments and I’ll make sure Alan gets them!