No.

No. twhirl is free software.

But developing twhirl takes time and energy. If you like it and want to show your support, you can donate some money to help!

twhirl is a desktop client for the popular microblogging service Twitter. It allows you to post short 140-character updates about what you are doing, as well as following your twitter friends and read all their updates, replies anyone sends to you, and direct messages to your account. You can also answer to another user by replying or sending him/her a private direct message.

twhirl has a lot of other features, for example looking up other user’s profiles, searching public tweets (powered by terraminds, favoring tweets etc.

The latest version added support to post your updates to two other services, Pownce and Jaiku.

Currently, twhirl supports most of the features of Twitter that are available to 3rd-party-clients. You need a valid Twitter account to use twhirl.

Since version 0.7, twhirl allows cross-posting status updates to Pownce and Jaiku. Reading messages from these services is not supported yet.

You can download AIR from http://get.adobe.com/air

twhirl uses the Adobe AIR runtime and can be installed and used on every system for which AIR is available. Currently, AIR 1.0 supports Windows (2000 SP4, XP SP2 and Vista) and Mac OSX (10.4.9 or newer, 10.5.x).

twhirl stores your configuration at two locations in your user profile directory. The first is an XML file that holds information about your selected color scheme and all twitter accounts you set up, the second is an encrypted data store provided by AIR in which twhirl saves passwords it should remember. The exact location where these files can be found differs, depending on the operating system you use.

The XML file is called “accounts.xml” and should be located at

• Max OS X:
  /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/de.makesoft.twhirl.<RANDOM>/Local Store
• Windows:
  C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\de.makesoft.twhirl.<RANDOM>\Local Store

The Encrypted Store used to store passwords consists of multiple files, their names start with “PrivateEcryptedData”. They are located in a folder called

…\Adobe\AIR\ELS\de.makesoft.twhirl.<RANDOM>

Attention: you need to look for folders ending with <RANDOM>. There might be folders without these (called “de.makesoft.twhirl” only); these were created by previous Adobe AIR beta versions and are not used anymore.

twhirl goes into paused mode when twitter sent back a response that the user’s request limit was exceeded and access to the account using their API has been temporarily disabled. Under normal conditions, Twitter allows up to 70 requests in 60 minutes to an account. The requests are counted per account, NOT per client!

For more information about the twitter API limit and its effects on twhirl, please read this blog posting.

twhirl uses system fonts installed on your computer to display tweets. While this allows you to choose your preferred font face (also including non-standard characters), Flash-based rendering of system fonts on OSX can lead to ugly results, especially for kerning.

To get better results, please select another font face in configuration. Users reported that Verdana at 12pt works good.

It’s a network status indicator. If it is green, everything is fine, twhirl had no problems to access the twitter servers. If it turns yellow or even red, some of the last requests have failed. You can move your mouse over the indicator to see a tooltip that will show you the network “health” as a percentage (100% is best).

The accounts manager will automatically open when you start twhirl and there are no accounts defined, or when none of the added accounts is configured to automatically connect on startup. If there is at least one account configured to auto-connect, it will be hidden.

There are multiple ways to open the account manager window:

• Click on the top left twhirl logo and name in any connected twhirl window.
• Use keyboard shortcut “m”
• Open the context menu for twhirl’s dock / sys tray icon and select command “Accounts manager”

twhirl marks tweets, replies and direct messages in your timeline as new or unread when it receives them, by adding a small dot in the top right corner. Simply click somewhere inside the tweet to mark it as seen. Pressing the dash or minus key “-” or clicking the small button below the timeline will mark all tweets as seen.

Unfortunately, the twitter servers do not support marking tweets as seen, so if twhirl fetches old tweets, replies or DMs on startup, it will mark them as new again, even if you marked them as seen in a previous session.

Open the context menu for twhirl’s dock icon (on OSX) / sys tray icon (on Windows) and select the “Reset windows” command. It will reduce all twhirl windows to the default size and cascade them from the top right corner of your primary screen.