I upgraded to Tweetdeck 0.3.0 and I was almost immediately looking for an alternative. There are a few reasons for that (the disappearing columns bug, watching it auto-shorten an already short url) but the biggest issue was the change they made to the behavior of the close button. What did they do? Well, with almost every other application on my machine (and all of the trivial ones*), when I click that red X, the application closes. Exits. Stops doing what it’s doing. The ones that don’t (my antivirus software springs to mind) actually need to run all the time. I don’t need Tweetdeck running 24/7. I often need it to just go away (using Fiddler with Tweetdeck running is maddening.) But yet, in Tweetdeck, if you click close, it actually minimizes to the systray.

So instead of:
Minimize, Maximize/ Restore Down, Close

it’s actually:
Minimize, Maximize/ Restore Down, Minimize (to Tray)

Which means, as far as I can tell, here’s no way to actually exit the application from within the interface. You can only exit by right clicking on the Tweetdeck icon in the systray. And there’s no way to change this behavior- give me a preference for this behavior and I wouldn’t be writing this blog post.

Call me crazy, but last time I checked Tweetdeck didn’t transmute lead to gold, so I have zero interest in changing deeply ingrained behavior and teaching myself that “close” isn’t really close just for the privilege of using it. It’s a Twitter app! I want NO effort at all.

Tweetdeck was suddenly a hassle, so I started casting about for another app.

This is the good part of this story 🙂

On Dave Cancel’s recommendation I checked out Brizzly and the results so far are pretty damn good. I’m liking the fact that it’s web based as I’ll always have a good client, with all my groups, no matter what machine I’m on, and the interface itself is pretty slick. It’s got nearly every feature I actually need out of Tweetdeck and it’s still only in closed beta, so I can’t wait to see where they go over the next few months.

If you’re interested in Brizzly @robreact me. I’ve got invites, etc. to share.

*I feel like I had to change the preference at some point in Pidgin, but the option was there, so it was soon forgotten.