Ada Twitter Client: Simplicity Makes Perfect
Everyone talks about Twitter these days: personal branding on Twitter, making friends through Twitter, finding new stuff on Twitter… Twitter, Twitter, Twitter!
As one of the somewhat-early adopters of this service, I noticed that Twitter is – actually was – based on the concept of simplicity. In time, along with the features introduced by users (conventions like the @ sign for replies) noise was created and the need to separate the interesting, juicy stuff from the mundane, boring things appeared.
Buuut… that’s not the subject of this post. Still, I want to relate to simplicity. We all have a favorite Twitter client which we use on our PCs or Macs. For example, I have two of them: at the office I use Tweetie (for Mac) and at home I use an app I just discovered, called Ada.
Ada Twitter from Madan
Before Ada I used Twhirl on my home computer but it kinda got too bulky for my taste. Many buttons and too many features doesn’t mean an application will satisfy everyone.
Ada is a small, simple, AIR-based app that won’t bother you with notifications while you’re working. The most recent version is 1.20 and you can find it here. It has a few themes that you can use and a drop-down menu from which you can choose what to see: main timeline, mentions and direct messages.
Although it’s pretty minimal and it won’t bother you like other apps, it still lacks some basic features. For example, I think that it wasn’t necessary a button for marking favourite tweets but one for sending direct messages to a tweet’s owner. I also don’t see why a “favorite tweet button” exists as there is no way to see the tweets you favourited through Ada. Or maybe I haven’t discovered it yet…
Another much needed feature would be using different colours for replies and direct messages. This would help out users who follow a lot of persons to differentiate replies and DMs from normal tweets directly on the main timeline.
Anyway, this little app is lovely and I would recommend it to everyone who wants a multiplatform Twitter client based on the concept of simplicity.
Hi,
I’m the developer of Ada. Thank you for writing a review. It’s well written and very balanced.
I just wanted to point out that you can easily send direct messages in Ada by typing ‘d’ followed by a space and the person’s username. For example, to send me a direct message, you would start your tweet with:
d sfsam
This is similar to the reply syntax which would be
@sfsam
Note that there is no ‘@’ for direct messages. Since it’s so easy to send direct messages with Ada, that’s why there isn’t a special button.
Also, there is a new version just released today which supports retweets (RT) due to popular demand.
Anyway, nice review!
Installed it a couple of days ago. I just love it!
Long live your family! :))