I recently received my first French spam comment, been a while since I did any French but I’m fairly certain it’s offering drugs for the floppy gentleman. It also mentions a duck. I can’t work that one out, thought it might be slang, and it is.. for newspaper. That’s the great thing about spam, it can actually be amusing at times and cause me to post photos of ducks.

Enough about that though, on to.. Twitter. That horrific thing that isn’t as bad as it always seemed.

Up ’til now I’ve been mainly using TweetDeck, but it hasn’t been terribly good since Twitter bought it. My main issue was the 30+ second delay between the new tweet pop-up disappearing and the tweet being added to the main window. Quite a problem when you’re halfway through reading one.

After finding a rather useless selection of ‘top 10′ style lists, and websites offering clients you’d regret putting your password in, I came across MetroTwit. The MetroTwit developers (being semi-famous Microsoft geeks) really know what they’re doing when it comes to writing applications for Windows**.

It does have an advert in if you don’t want to pay the (too high for me) price for the pro version. Once you invert the colours and get over the initially blinding pink/green/blue bits everywhere, it’s quite nice. It’s still in development so I expect they’ll sort out the inconsistencies like half the dialogs having back/cancel buttons and half requiring a click elsewhere.

Other than that, it’s very configurable, including notifications on a monitor of your choice (yay). Also potentially a taste of what Windows 8 is going to be like. (Seriously, if Windows 8 makes me transition to a whole new screen every time I want to consider launching a program, I won’t be using it.)

My most common problem, as touched upon, is the close buttons. Here’s a pop-up/dialog/window.

Now, mystery reader, I don’t know about you, but when I want to close a window, I’m somewhat used to an ‘X’ in the top right corner. Not only is there no ‘X’, there’s a button which causes a delay while you wait for a new column to devour your API calls before you can delete it.

Closing the window requires clicking on the window behind it, in Windows.. that usually brings it to the foreground, not causes the one you’re using to close. If this is how metro apps are supposed to work then god help us all. “Windows 2D 8, now with 100% less depth!”.

That said, if you’re looking for a Windows desktop Twitter client, give MetroTwit a go, it’s (probably) only going to improve and it’s already quite good.

_{* I don’t know how the MetroTwit guys would feel about being grouped like that, but hey, my blog, free advertising.}

_{** Windows is currently my main operating system, I play too many games and use too many resource intensive Windows only programs for it not to be. However I usually have a virtual machine with Fedora running fullscreen on one monitor. My laptop was actually running Linux until recently, then the graphics chip caught fire and things started flickering and sparking.}