Squeaky hinges

Tweetie is my favourite twitter client. It’s reliable, unobtrusive, Mac OS native, and it isn’t one of those power-clients that make twitter feel like a job. It’s well worth the money.

I feel a little bad singling it out for criticism so I hope you’ll take my comments as a broadside aimed at all non-malleable software, rather than as a snipe at this excellent application.

You see, Tweetie, like most commercial software is closed source. That means I can’t myself change the way it works. I can’t help to fix it.

It has one annoying and I’d think, simple to fix, bug that daily gets on my nerves.

My twitter name is @beng which is a subset of the far more popular @bengoldacre.

Tweetie should highlight posts that mention me like so:

And so it does! But it also highlights posts mentioning @bengoldacre too, like so:

This is such a minor annoyance. I can’t bring myself to care about it too much. But it’s a demonstration of how non-malleable software can be disempowering. Not in big, dramatic “Microsoft is evil but OpenOffice makes you FREE” way, but more in a niggly, annoying way.

It’s like a squeaky hinge that I’m not allowed to oil.

I’m pretty sure that lurking within Tweetie’s code is a regular expression that matches tweets to see whether to highlight them. There’s probably one character that needs changing in this expression to make it less greedy.

I have the know-how to make this change; I’m sure the bug affects hardly anyone else. And yet, I can’t make the change myself because the software is closed.

I don’t want to bug Atebits about this, it’s such a little thing. Although I’m sure it will get fixed because they do seem to really care about these small details. Like I said, this isn’t really about Tweetie itself at all.

These squeaky hinges are typical of closed software experiences – and it’s time we started noticing them and calling them out. I think we accept the consequences of non-malleable software too readily.

Postscript: “So, you’re saying that Atebits should make their source code freely available, just because of a little bug that affects practically no-one? Do you think people shouldn’t get paid for writing software? What are you? Some kind of freetard?”

Well, you miss my point, Strawman, and haven’t read what I’ve said. It would be better – for my definition of better – if all software was open to being fixed, fiddled with, and improved by its users. And no, I don’t care if I’m asking for the moon on a stick.