There’s a good interview with Iain Dodsworth, the creator of TweetDeck, over on Louis Gray’s blog. Louis was one of the first people to discover and talk about TweetDeck and decided to chat with Iain a year later about how things are going. TweetDeck is still the Twitter client I use the most and provides me the most flexibility in searches and groups. During the interview there were a couple of AIR-related thoughts from Iain that I thought were worth sharing:
Louis: What made you decide to develop TweetDeck? You certainly went a different way with your product than others did, using the multi-column format, integrating Summize, groups, etc? What drove its initial feature set and had you choose the AIR platform?
Iain: …. AIR was an easy decision at the time – I had already been developing applications in Flex for financial institutions in London and there was no quicker way for a one man team to develop an application cross-platform.
Louis: TweetDeck, while popular, has also highlighted issues on Twitter’s end, especially around the service’s API limits. Also, the product has been a notorious memory hog and can take a good share of processing power. How are you working to reduce the demands taken on power users’ desktops, and how have you found working with Twitter and their API team, as they recently upped the API accesses users could hit per hour from 100 to 150?
Iain: I have worked very closely with Adobe to make improvements to the TweetDeck codebase and to work around various AIR/Flex issues. CPU & memory usage is an ongoing area for improvement and can sometimes be a bit of an art-form but we are getting there and the current version is a marked improvement over previous versions.
We’re always working (both on the actual runtime and with developers) to make sure that the AIR experience is better. I know the AIR team has been helped tremendously by Iain and all of the TweetDeck users. So congrats on a year Iain and thanks for helping make AIR a success.
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