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If you're not up to date (and I don't blame you) with AIR-based desktop Twitter/FriendFeed clients, here's a short recap. Twhirl is pretty much the best Twitter client around, while AlertThingy is a very similar FriendFeed client. Since FriendFeed also incorporates Twitter updates, these two clients overlap significantly, but now that Twhirl (you cannot get it updated automatically just yet, but you can get the latest version here) has added support for FriendFeed, it's painfully obvious that, essentially, you only need one of these two applications.
The question is, which one?
Well, I've tried them both out and I cannot definitely decide that one is better than the other, but I can give you a good idea of what they can do.
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Twhirl's FriendFeed counterpart cannot currently be merged with the Twitter client, so if you want both, you need to have both open. This gives Twhirl no immediate advantage over AlertThingy. The two applications pretty much look the same; they both support themes so you can make them both black and beautiful like I did in the screenshot below.
Functionality wise, if we're only looking at the FriendFeed support part, AlertThingy is a bit better. It has nicer formatting, the ability to immediately comment on items, and expand (but not collapse, why?) the comments. It also gives you the opportunity to post to FriendFeed and Twitter directly from the client, whereas in Twhirl you need to use two windows (one for FF, one for Twitter) to do that.
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Twhirl, however, has a number of minor details that AlertThingy doesn't: you can squeeze the window into narrower width; you can set the client to hide when minimized, you can precisely set the opacity, the font, the refresh times. If you're the customizing type, you'll love the options.
Performance wise, it's a tough call; both applications are quite memory hungry; AlertThingy's one window was eating around 30 megs of memory hile Twhirl's two windows were eating 60 megs. It's a lot for small applications like these, and I hope to see improvements with this regard in both.
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