When Twitterrific Stops Twittering

I’ve been using Twitterrific for several months now — probably almost as long as I’ve been using Twitter. Since upgrading to version 3.0, I’ve had a problem where sending a tweet would break the software. The tweet would be sent, but the text would stay in the textbox and Twitterrific would stop receiving tweets. The only fix was to close it and reopen it.

I couldn’t find anything about this problem anywhere online. I tried using some other clients for a while. That was when I learned just how much better Twitterrific is then any other Twitter client for the Mac.

So, in a moment of desperation, I emailed Iconfactory to ask about the problem. I’m not usually one to ask for tech support, particularly when I’m using the free version of a product. But I thought maybe, just maybe, they had heard of this problem before.

Craig Hockenberry wrote me back the next day. Why no, they had not ever seen this problem before. But, he thought it might be caused by incorrectly changing preferences via the command line. Specifically, doing this:

$ defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific preferenceName YES

Instead of this:

$ defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific preferenceName -bool YES

And as soon as I read that I knew that was the problem. I remembered setting a hidden preference this way, and I didn’t remember -bool being part of it. So I shut down Twitterrific, deleted the plist file from ~/Library/Preferences, and restarted the software. It worked — Twitterrific was back to normal.

Anyway, I thought I should write this up in case anyone else borks their favorite Twitter client the same way I did. Big thanks to Craig for the help and to Iconfactory for writing great software.