gTwitter is a Twitter client for Linux written in Mono/C# and uses GTK+ for the GUI, which was inspired by the Mac client Twitterific. The version being tested is 1.0 beta, released in June 2007. According to the project’s homepage, gTwitter is currently “under heavy development”.
Installation/Setup: 
Like Twitux, I ran into a number of dependency issues when trying to install gTwitter from source. However, there are two alternative methods that can be used – installation from Subversion or from the package repositories. I chose to install from the package repositories using apt-get install gtwitter, which was completely painless.
Once I got the app running, I just had to enter my credentials and I was off. There were no little tricks I had to do to get tweets to show up; it just worked. The default view for gTwitter is List View, but I couldn’t find any way to change that during setup.
User Interface: 
gTwitter’s UI is a no-frills approach to reading tweets. There are two views for the application: the default List View and the alternate Tweet View. I feel that List View isn’t very useful for general browsing because you have to click through your tweets to see what was said. When you switch over to Tweet View, gTwitter becomes a bit more useful in the sense that there’s not any clicking around to see things.
It looks like you can only view the last 12 tweets from gTwitter. It also says that all tweets were fetched “less than a minute ago”, which gives the user no indication of the timeframe of the tweets. The other annoying thing about the UI is that it only resizes to a certain width. After that, gTwitter no longer expands to fill the window’s full horizontal space.
[/caption]
User Experience:
From a usability standpoint, gTwitter is not very user friendly. In order to click on a link in a tweet, you have to be in List View and find the tweet. When the tweet loads, you can then click on the link. There is no option to do this from Tweet View, so I found myself switching back and forth constantly in order to click links.
I like the fact that the tweeting is done inline with the application, but there are no built-in options to reply directly, send a direct message, or retweet. When in List View, clicking on an avatar will bring up profile information, and clicking on the user’s name will bring up their profile in your browser. However, this is specific to List View.
Features:
I’m somewhat hesitant to call anything in this application a feature. The only things you can do from gTwitter is read and send tweets. While sending tweets is pretty easy (as long as you’re not trying to reply directly), reading becomes pretty cumbersome if you need to switch between the application’s views. gTwitter can be set to update every 1, 3, 5, 10, or 30 minutes.
Performance:
The main reason for a low score on performance was due to somewhat frequent application crashes. I think part of the reason the application crashed was due to Mono, the Linux version of .NET that the application runs on. It’s not built in a language that necessarily runs well on Linux and actually has to be compiled and run through Mono instead of directly like other Linux apps.
Aside from the crashes, gTwitter was responsive and quick to switch views and fetch new tweets. I didn’t notice any lag or unusual system resource allocation while testing the application.
Overall Impression:
I feel like the people who are using the application have been placated by the developers into thinking that there’s development going on. When the last version update was made over a year ago, there’s a pretty clear message that not much is going on, no matter what the project page says.
In my testing, I couldn’t find anything that set gTwitter apart from other Linux clients (to compare apples to apples) or anything that would give me any reason to use it. If you’re looking for a Twitter application for Linux, there is at least one nominally better option. Unless you need a desktop application, I recommend sticking with the web interface or taking your chances on an AIR client.
No Comments on Twitter
Be the first!