Two high-profile companies are shutting down development for two platforms this week. First, Facebook has announced it is ceasing development of the Facebook and WhatsApp applications for BlackBerry OS.
The app landscape continues to evolve, and in ways that are not always within our control. Recently, Facebook made the decision to discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry and WhatsApp announced they would end support for BlackBerry 10 and BBOS at the end of 2016.
In addition, Twitter announced it is ceasing development of its only application for desktop Windows, TweetDeck.
To better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience, we’ll no longer support a standalone Windows app. If you use Windows, you’ll still be able to visit TweetDeck on the web – nothing is changing about TweetDeck itself, just where you access it from. This change will take effect on April 15th.
TweetDeck was the only desktop Twitter client the company ever supported (it bought TweetDeck several years ago), and while it is far from perfect, it’s the only desktop Twitter client that was halfway decent. Twitter never created a proper Win32 client, and neither did anyone else. They do have a Metro client developed by a third party, but it’s pretty terrible and a horrible user experience on a desktop machine.
Unlikely as it is, I’m still stubbornly holding out hope somebody creates a nice and elegant Win32 Twitter client, because with the shutdown of TweetDeck, I don’t have any options for using Twitter on the computing platform I use the most (i.e., Windows).
For something like twitter, the web is fine for me. Its not exactly xcode or photoshop.
It depends how you use it. If you like to keep your Twitter client window open, then the web is probably fine. If, on the other hand, you like to keep it in the background and get select notifications about important events, and to have it run constantly, then the web isn’t so great. I agree, the Windows Twitter client landscape is very much lacking. Most other platforms have awesome clients, but somehow Windows has been ignored.
So basically the simplest solution would be for someone to write a notification app that redirects to the web site?
Simplest, but probably not the most streamlined. If you use Chrome, in fact, you can already have this. It’s generally nice to have timelines and at least basic functions right there.
Why you’d need an app is beyond me, there is a notifications API:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/notification
Also Thunderbird as a Twitter feed which will give you notifications.
Anyone remember the old Adobe AIR based Tweet Deck (the one TweetDeck produced before Twitter bought them, and they switched to an HTML5 container)?
That old yellow icon TweetDeck was better in a lot of ways than even the current TweetDeck. I never really used the blue icon one.
Apparently, Twitter are desperate for users.
They might want to stop killing off the usable ways of accessing it, forcing people to use their crappy experiences.
There are no users anymore, only potential ad targets. It’s sad.
There are a lot of SJW stuff going on at Twitter and people have complained about how anything that is politically to the right aren’t showing up in feeds.
I don’t know if it is true at all, but if it is … it is pretty shitty.
I haven’t noticed anything disappearing, but those groups do like to bully people into “voluntarily” removing content. They’re nasty.
It might as well be just because the right has the culture of victimism deeply embedded in its core. Just sayin’
I don’t think twitter will be around for a long time.
As you said, they’re desperate for users, and they are desperate to keep Wall St. happy which means they’re on the horns of a dilemma as they won’t be able to please both.
I think that means they’ll opt to try to make money, which will make twitter an awful experience, and the users will jump onto the next social media bandwagon.
…and nothing of value was lost.
I don’t think that is correct.
Twitter has some pretty good use cases, debating complicated topics isn’t it. What it is good at doing is a quick share of information with some basic context.
Yeah, but do you really need a bloated thick client for that?
Better than a bloated, thick website.
I wrote a commandline client in C# quite a few years ago, so I could understand their api and how the OAuth flow worked, I should probably dust the code off if I can find it.
Edited 2016-03-23 20:52 UTC
Make sure it uses the 1.1 API. The switch from 1.0 t0 1.1 broke many a Twitter client.
Facebook have never supported BB10. FB app was written by blackberry itself using their API, instagram didn’t have any official app too (just third party appeared later on, or android runtime could be used). Some parts of facebook API are not accessible since end of this month, so blackberry just changed it to shortcut to web application (this bb app was pretty bad anyway).
WhatsApp had very good support and it’s a bit of shame that they included bb10 as “legacy” platform (but again they are fb company now and business is business). It’s not as bad for the next year or so as platform still have alternatives and android app support but definitely next upgrade to bb10 device would make much less sense in the context of these news.
They just released a Windows Universal Platform version of their client, so no real need to maintain TwitDeck on top of that.
… that someone posting on a website about Operating Systems actually uses Windows as their main OS.
because with the shutdown of TweetDeck, I don’t have any options for using Twitter on the computing platform I use the most (i.e., Windows).
You could always try Project Macaw. On WebOS it is a favourite twitter app but because it is based on the Enyo framework it is multiplatform too. The Chrome App is available below:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/macaw/mhpopablkdchbgelchal…
More info here: https://github.com/minego/macaw-enyo
I like how you make it sound like you can’t use Twitter at all in Windows now. Except, you know, in any browser…
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Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Synapse)