FOSSwire

Microblogging service Twitter is ever popular, and is a great way for keeping in contact with your friends in real time and seeing what they are up to. What makes Twitter what it is though, is the ability to update your status and receive messages on all sorts of devices, as well as the web interface.

Twitux is a native GTK/Gnome client for Twitter.

It is now apparently in Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian repositories, install it through the package name twitux, or you can download the source here. In my case, I'm installing through the Fedora repositories.

Once installed, you launch the application and you're prompted for your Twitter username and password. Twitux uses GNOME's Keyring application to save your password, if you choose to do so. Once that's done, you immediately get shown your friends timeline.

By default, Twitux checks the timelines every five minutes, and auto-refreshes them.

The timeline views are executed perfectly, they are compact and clear while still showing you the avatar of the Twitter user, and of course, their status updates. There's an option in Edit > Preferences to enable notifications when a new message comes in if you so wish.

As well as the normal friends and public timelines and your Direct Messages and such, you can also view a timeline of tweets for a specific friend, which is a nice feature if you want to stalk catch up with one particular person.

Updating your status from the client isn't immediately obvious, as the timeline window doesn't include an update section (in the style of Mac client Twitterrific). However, going to Twitter > New Message or pressing Ctrl-N opens a compact window where you enter your status and Send it off.

There is also a feature for Direct Messages on the menu, where you select a friend from a pop-up list, and enter a message to send to them. This works well, but the use of a pop-up menu means that if you have a lot of friends on Twitter, you may have to scroll the list, which could become annoying. Not a major issue, but a possible concern for heavy Twitter users.

Twitux makes a pretty good Twitter client for your GNOME desktop. The integration with Keyring means you don't have to worry about the security of your passwords nearly as much, and the interface is clear and well designed. Recommended for all GNOME Twitter users.

And if you are a Twitter user, why not add FOSSwire to get notified of new posts here as they happen?

Peter gives you a brief taster of how to use screen capture program recordMyDesktop, and its graphical cousin gtk-recordMyDesktop, to make videos from what is happening on your screen.

Simplicity is a wonderful thing sometimes. Leafpad is designed to be just that, simple. It is designed as a plain text editor.

The interface is also very basic, and I must say, somewhat reminiscent of Notepad on Windows.

It certainly doesn't get in your way - there isn't even a toolbar, as the number of options on the menus is small enough that you don't really need one. It does feature full undo and redo support, a very basic find and replace feature and word wrap, line numbers and an auto-indenting option.

It's actually quite difficult to say a lot more about this application, other than it really does feel... like a Notepad clone. No disrespect to it - I can certainly see there are some use cases where you might prefer something without loads of features - for example on low-spec systems, or when you don't want this and that feature interrupting your work.

Other than that though, it's quite hard for me to see where it would fit in and provide a significant advantage over a standard text editor like Gedit.

It does what it does well, and succeeds at being über minimalistic, but unless you find cutting your memory usage and feature sets particularly exciting, it could be a stretch to actually use it instead of something else.