The official Twitter for Mac app gives a great interface for Twitter: lightweight, compact, no bloat, and it looks great. Unfortunately, amongst the hundreds of Twitter clients already existing, I couldn't find anything similar for Linux or Windows. Instead of creating yet another client (which Twitter doesn't like anyway), I did a bit of Qt WebKit coding, and created a small desktop client around the (current) Twitter Mobile Web interface.

Update: The mobile Twitter website was updated, and doesn't work as well anymore with TwitCoop. I will try to upgrade TwitCoop to work with the new interface, but it is currently not clear whether this is at all possible.

First, some screenshots:

Features of this desktop interface include:

• Compact
• Provides an "official", consistent Twitter interface
• Automatically refreshes when new tweets are available (with a higher refresh rate than the default mobile web interface)
• Opens external (i.e. non-Twitter) links in your preferred web browser
• Allows you to hide the Tweet box, when screen real estate is a problem (e.g. on netbooks)
• Allows you to customize the zoom level
• Automatically logs you into your previous Twitter session on startup
• Supports "kinetic scrolling"
• Works on Windows and Linux

Note that some of these features may become obsolete once the new mobile interface becomes available to everyone, and maybe some stuff will break, so I will need to update this then. The mobile web application isn't as responsive as a real native client, but this may change with the new mobile interface as well.

You can try it out for yourself by downloading the Windows version (requires the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, which may already be installed on your system), or by building it yourself from the development repository.