App or web or both

I had to check myself this morning before I rushed off to do another download.

I had just read this article.

“‘Anatine’ Is a Simple Desktop Twitter App for Linux“

Why?

I run Ubuntu on my laptop.  As such, I’ve run and tried many stand alone Twitter applications but always keep coming back to using Hootsuite in a tab in my Firefox browser.

Here’s a screen capture of my home screen in Hootsuite.  I’ve got access to my name being mentioned and then an ongoing monitoring of the great things happening in my Ontario Educators lists.

Hootsuite is unique in that it has tabs inside the tab that’s open in the browser.  You’ll note that I could switch to the tab “My Stuff” or “Lists” with a single click.  I think everyone has their own technique to trying to stay on top of things.  This is my way.

So, the bottom line is that if I had a Twitter Desktop App, I’d actually have to switch to it to see what I want instead of just switching to an open Hootsuite tab.  It’s not perfect; I’m always in search of “perfect” but this is as good as it gets for me at the present time.

And yet, as I’m ready to put a punctuation mark on the post and move on, I realize that that isn’t the entire story.  Yes, it’s the way I do things when I’ve booted into Windows or use my Macintosh.  I think it’s very productive to just being a tab away from what I need.

But that’s not the only game.  There’s my phone and tablet.

I know that they’re capable of running a web browser and I could most certainly run Hootsuite in a tab on them.  But I don’t.

Instead, I do have an actual Twitter app to do the job for me.  Somehow, accessing the resources that way makes more sense.  I could easily write that off to screen size and maybe that’s the story that I’ll stick with. 

And yet, I still wonder.  To Rushkoff it, am I programming my experience or is my experience programming me?  I can live with the former; I worry about the latter.

Your thoughts?  If you use multiple devices, do you use the same strategy or do you adjust it accordingly?

Curious about more applications?  Anatine is available here (Linux, MacOS, and Windows) and if you search your favourite online store, you’ll find that there are all kinds of great applications written by talented programmers.