Shooting at Bubbles

In my one other teardown post here I took a look at to AIR desktop client applications for Twitter and since people seemed to like I figured I’d do the same thing for a native Windows desktop client. Now I had already written about bDule over at The Inquisitr and at that time I wasn’t sure if I would stick with bDule or not. It ended up that I went back to using Seesmic Desktop after one of its recent updates.

Then in the last couple of days I’ve had a hankering to check back with bDule since they had done an update since my post. Now right off the bat – this is Alpha release software. It says so right on the title bar of the application so if you don’t like playing on the cutting edge consider yourself forewarned. The other thing I am going to do as well in this post is include some suggestions for the bDule team to consider. Now on to the goodies.

Select yourself a template

When bDule starts up for the first one of the first screens you will see is the Template screen. You can also select this screen at any time from the main menu if you want to change the display.

If this is your first time running bDule the main screen will now display your template layout and you can select which service you want running in each section. This is where you will also notice that bDule supports Facebook, and quite a nice job of it but more on that in a bit.

So once you have selected, and entered in your service ID information you’ll start to see something like this older screenshot I took for my Inquisitr post.

However if you have already been using bDule but want to change your template just click on the Change Template menu item, select the template you want. Then you will be shown a layout of the template where you can then drag and drop your existing bDule panels to where you want them.

So once you place the services and click Ok you’ll be able to work inside of your new layout.

Now that we’ve got a comfortable workspace let’s have a look at how bDule handles Twitter and Facebook.

Hello Twitter

The way Twitter messages are displayed is pretty standard these days across the majority of desktop clients. With bDule your command options are in a bar at the side of your list of messages.

Pretty fare when it comes to Twitter clients but there are two that are really nice to have. The first is the Create New Twitter Group option. When you select this option you’ll see something like this show up

So creating a new group that you want to keep an eye on is as simple as entering the name and then clicking on the who in your list of Twitter friends you want to add to the new group. Once you click the Add Group button bDule creates the new group and adds a tab for it along with your others at the top of the list.

But what if I want to have that new group in a section of it’s own. Well the current way to do this would be to delete one of the current panels and then select Twitter a the service to have displayed in that panel. Once it is displaying the default lists for Twitter delete them from the list by click on the ‘X’ on the tab. When they are all gone click on the Add New Group just as you did above and select who you want in the group. At which point your group list will be ready for you, as well you can add even more groups to this section if you want.

It’s kind of a round about way to create and handle special groups but for now it does the job.

There is one feature in bDule that will probably be one near and dear to a lot of peoples hearts when it comes to Twitter. A built-in spam filter. Yes folks you can now filter out all those irritating #spymaster messages, or any other type of message you like based on key words or even phrases.

Wrapping up bDule’s Twitter stuff and some stuff that needs work

For an Alpha release I think that bDule does a pretty good job and really for the average user it will probably be enough. That said there’s some things I really think that needs to be addressed.

1. Better differentiation between new and old messages – as it stands right now you can’t tell at a quick glance which are new messages and which are old ones.
2. Keyboard shortcuts – power users are going to be sorely disappointed with the total lack of keyboard shortcuts in bDule. To be fair though most clients are really lacking in this regard.
3. Notifications – see my program wrap up for this as at this point bDule has no notification system in place which gives them a chance to do some good stuff.
4. Add New Group friends list – I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think that bDule is showing a complete list of followers so this needs to be looked into. One other option here as well is give us the option to search for users from the Add Group panel.

Hello Facebook

I like the way that bDule works with Facebook even when compared to Seesmic Desktop. I was a little reluctant at first as to whether or not I even wanted to try it out but I’ve gotten to like it being there. The layout is similar to the way bDule displays Twitter messages with the command options at the side of the message list.

Now where I like bDule much better that Seesmic Desktop when it comes to Facebook integration is with the options for the individual messages. With Seesmic Desktop comments are added by switching to a separate display whereas with bDule it’s inline.

As well you can read any comments that are inline as well.

When it comes to Liking, or to Unlike, a message it is as simple as clicking on the link.

Wrapping up bDule’s Facebook Stuff

To be honest I’m not a big user of Facebook so bDule pretty well covers anything that I think I could need when it comes to using the service from a desktop client. Other’s might have suggestion and if so please add them to the comments on this post.

Wrapping up bDule

I like bDule and even though it is only an Alpha release it pretty well covers everything I would need from a client. One very big thing that the bDule team will need to address is the memory used by the program.

Now to be fair I’ve seen Seesmic Desktop go past 200,000 K in memory usage so I am really hoping that this is an issue that will be dealt with for future builds.

I did mention earlier about the lack of a notification system within bDule and this is something that I hope will be fixed shortly but in the meantime here’s a few ideas about the notifications.

• It would be really nice if we could assign notifications on a per panel basis.
• notifications for retweets with the user’s name in it
• notifications of direct messages
• notification of regular tweets with the users name in it
• notifications based on keywords or phrases

In regards to the application on the whole it would be nice if

• we could skin individual panels / service
• be able to hide the menu bar as it really isn’t needed all the time
• be able to custom name each of the panels since we already have the service icons to let us know which service is running in which panel
• color alerts (individual message background color) of messages that match keywords or phrases
• color my messages differently
• color messages to me differently

I think that’s it for now

I’m sure there are other things that will come to mind just after I hit the publish button on this but for now that pretty well covers this teardown of bDule. Hope it helps