William Bokunic’s Weblog

A few weeks back Google announced, and then released their web browser Chrome. Unfortunately it is only available for Windows at the moment, but Google did provide the source code and method for compiling Chrome for other operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X.

So obviously I tried compiling it for OS X as soon as it was possible. And after three hours of trying and two GB of space wasted I was presented with literally thousands of errors in XCode. I’m not a programmer so I decided to give up. Though only a day later I found a method for getting Chrome to work in OS X through use of Wine.

I won’t go into the details of what Wine is or does, just know that it lets you run Windows applications on other operating systems. Suffice to say, it worked (after about two hours of waiting for files to download and install). It wasn’t easy to get working and you had to launch Chrome from the terminal, so I held off blogging about it.

So why am I blogging about it now? Well, because there’s an easier method which was made by the people over at CodeWeaver’s.

CodeWeaver’s make a commercial version of Wine for Linux and Mac OS X called Crossover. Crossover builds on Wine making it easier to install specific applications than on a typical Wine installation.

CodeWeaver’s decided to make a free release (which is a first), called CrossOver Chronium. You can probably guess that this is a stand alone application to run Google’s Chrome web browser inside of Linux and Mac OS X, and you’re right. So if you’ve been wanting to give Chrome a whirl but don’t use Windows, head over to CodeWeaver’s site to download Crossover Chronium!

There are a ton of Twitter clients - applications which let you use Twitter instead of needing to goto twitter.com to tweet - available, and I’ve tried most, if not all of them (for the Mac at least). I’ve had some good experiences, and some bad ones. But from this I have a pretty good idea of which is the best.

Now, first and foremost, I’m not a fan of paying to do something which should be free. So basically no Twitter apps which cost money I consider to be worth it. That being said, what is the Twitter app that I preferred? Well, quite simply it’s Twhirl.

Twhirl not only looks good (in my opinion), but it’s very functional. Any link you post is instantly turned into a tinyurl.com link which is nice. The interface is very intuitive. And best of all, it’s cross-platform.

Twhirl was programmed in Adobe Air, which is a programming language Adobe is pioneering that any OS can run (well, only Windows and Mac OS X have official version at the moment, Linux is only in beta).

Some niceties that Twhirl provides are:

A very customizable notification system: Basically if you want to be notified at a certain time, Twhirl can probable do it.

Integration with Jaiku and Pownce: While you cannot view your friends pownces or jaiku messages, you can post to those services simultaneously with your tweets.

Configure the interface: Although I cannot figure out how to change its theme, you can change things like opacity, font type, size, etc.

I consider Twhirl to be one of the best, if not the best Twitter client you can use. Try it out if you haven’t been satisfied with what you’re currently using.