Witty: A Great Twitter Client For Windows

When we first looked at Witty, the Windows Twitter client powered by WPF, the software was in a newly released beta version. Since then, the Witty software has updated several times and is now a stable application with a lot of great features for Twitter fans. In the newest version, version 1.9.0, you have all the standard options found in a Twitter desktop client including the ability to see replies, direct messages, and, of course, view the auto-refreshing timeline of your friends’ tweets. However, what’s really nice about the Witty Twitter client is its UI.

The Witty software has an uncluttered interface with just four menus at the top: “Recent,” “Replies,” “User,” and “Messages.” There are also buttons above the menu for accessing options and manually refreshing the tweets. At first, you might think that Witty is missing key features – like the ability to reply or direct message a user directly from one of their tweets, but that’s not the case at all. Instead, all the interactions are hidden within the right-click menu. By right-clicking on a tweet in your timeline, you can reply, direct message, or re-tweet. From this same menu, you can also delete a tweet (assuming Twitter turns that functionality back on), clear all tweets, and refresh the timeline. By placing those functions in a menu instead on the Witty interface itself, the client is able to maintain its clean, minimalistic look and feel which allows you to clearly see the tweets themselves without any distractions.

In the Options area of Witty, you can configure how often your timeline refreshes. That setting can be anywhere from one minute to 30. You can also choose to have Witty pinned on top of your other windows, minimize it to the tray, or play sounds when new tweets roll in. As you receive new tweets, Witty pop-up messages appear just above your system tray, similar to how other Twitter clients, like Twhirl for example, behave. However, if you’re not a fan of these notifications, you can optionally turn them off in the settings.

Witty comes with three themes to choose from: Aero (the default), Aero Compact, and Cool Blue. The Blue theme (pictured here) is just a re-colored revamp of the Aero default, but the Aero Compact theme actually presents a different layout. In the Compact view, the text size, image size, and spacing of the tweets is reduced so you can see more tweets in the window without having to resize it. This is a great option for those who follow a lot of Twitterers and don’t want to miss anything.

It’s also worth noting that technical users can patch Witty for use with the open microblogging platform, Identi.ca, too. 

Although there are a lot of Twitter clients available, there are few that are as well designed as Witty. If you want to try it out, you can download it for yourself from here.