Goodbye TweetDeck! Hello… umm TweetDeck?!

Okay so as a regular Linux and Twitter user, I have had to live with TweetDecks partially compatible program for quite some time. I’ve tried using the Twitter site (dull and featureless) and Hootsuite (didn’t agree, felt disengaged), but I’ve always returned to Tweetdeck.

Don’t get me wrong, the boys over at TweetDeck have built a great program, it just has a few very annoying interminant bugs in Ubuntu. One of them, the most common, is shown below. It occurs when you scroll down a stream and then back up… fatal…

Now the only way to make them readable again is to reload the program. It would happen at least once a day, usually more. I’m not entirely sure what causes it, sometimes I can go hours (even days) without it happening, but the more I use my Ubuntu machines the more likely it seems to occur.

Anyway I decided to follow a friends advise and switch over to Chrome’s TweetDeck extension. First impressions are very good, especially if you ‘pin’ the TweetDeck tab in Chrome so that its always open and takes up little space in the tab bar.

TweetDeck’s Scheduler (Updated 5th Dec 2011)

Updated 5th Dec 2011. It turns out that all you need to do for scheduled tweets to work, and for the scheduler to appear properely, is to create an account and stay signed in. Then the tweets will correctly post whenever you want! Cool beans.

Unfortunately I have found a few bugs, firstly if you go to the compose message box and then click the close cross, it seems to give you a new option beside the Send button, allowing for scheduled tweets. This option isn’t visible by default, only after clicking the close cross, which incidentally doesn’t obviously close it either.

Strange behaviour but yay for scheduled tweets! (Switching back to the original TweetDeck program I see they have it there also, so that feature was obviously added and I was completely oblivious, oh well)

Annoyingly though, everytime I try and schedule a Tweet I get this occuring…

So not usable for me just yet 🙁

If anyone knows a solution to this please leave a message below.

Large Tweets not posting…

Also when I try sending a tweet that contains hash tags, URLs (that auto shorten nicely) and zero characters of free ‘tweet space’, I get a similar red circle of doom but with a different error. A solution to this bug is simply to remove a few characters so that there’s 1 or 2 free characters, then the tweet seems to post fine. Odd behaviour, probably down to a miscalculation of how many characters there are. Who knows.

Conclusion

All in all I’m really happy with the switch, with my only two main quibbles mentioned above. Once you remember to look in Chrome for it instead of for its own program tab, you should easily be able to leave TweetDeck’s buggy Linux desktop program behind.