twhirl is a desktop app that allows users to send and receive tweets, @replies and DMs.

Features:

• remembering login credentials on user’s computer
• all-in-one timeline with tweets, replies and direct messages
• configurable auto-updates for the timeline
• displaying user’s latest 20 status updates and direct messages sent
• sending status updates
• sending replies to other users (with quick buttons on others’ statuses)
• sending direct messages to other users
• showing user’s friends and followers
• deleting own status updates and direct messages
• input area can be hidden (configurable auto-hiding)
• multi-account support
• keyboard shortcuts
• sys tray / dock icon support
• audible and visual notifications
• viewing and (un)setting favorites
• (un)following users
• auto-updating the program
• changeable color schemes
• searching for public tweets (powered by terraminds)
• filtering the timeline
• ** saved searches on Twitter
• ** searching for tweets mentioning @username
• ** Ping.fm support for twitter and laconi.ca/identi.ca
• ** video recording
• ** English spell checking
• ** bit.ly short URL support

The Good:

twhirl is a great multi-account Twitter desktop client based on AIR and Flex. It sports a compact UI, keyboard shortcuts, many features like auto-connect, auto-refreshing tweets, sending updates, replies, direct messages and more. Users are able to filter tweets, lookup other users to follow/unfollow and shorten URLs. Twitpic is supported.

The Not-so-Good:

This application is easy to use, but note it is not open-source. That won’t be a big issue for most users. Although you can filter tweets for a particular keyword, it isn’t possible to filter groups of users for display. Other than that, there seem to be few complaints, except perhaps that more color schemes/themes would be good. The multiple account support is a huge bonus feature.

**On 9 Feb 09, twhirl released an update with some new features (shown above with **). Our rating is now up to 4.5 / 5.**

Tweetwave.com rates it: ♦♦♦♦