A solution to the Twitter Jail problem…

My followers on Twitter are all too aware of my bitching about being in Twitter Jail. Which is what happens when Twitter thinks you’ve outstayed your welcome and shuts you out, either saying you’ve reached your hourly limit (infuriating when I’ve been offline for 36 hours!) or saying Sorry! We did something wrong. Please refresh the page and try again. Equally cretinous and utterly meaningless.

They need a new announcement “Sorry, we’re total fuckups but, hey, we don’t care!”

Anyway, I figured out that the cause of my problems was the third-party Twitter client, TweetDeck. A couple of weeks ago I stopped using TweetDeck and switched to MetroTwit, and all was well with Twitter.

However, there are several problems with MetroTwit that annoy the hell out of me. I’m photo-sensitive, so I need to be able to control the background colour of whatever is displayed on my monitor – glaring white is not acceptable (even though I have the brightness dialled down to 50%). In Windows, and anything that uses Windows colours, I go for a pale blue, which has a very good contrast with black text, or a colour that’s as close as I can get on apps that have their own colour palette.

That that’s the problem with MetroTwit – it doesn’t have a colour palette, it just has two colour schemes, black or white. White of course, glares, but black, unless you’re a 12-year-old Goth, just sucks, MetroTwit’s version more than others as all the op-out menus have black text on a dark grey ground – mostly illegible.

I’ve spoken to them about this, and they say just one other person has complained. OK, maybe so, but how many thousands have just thought “Bugger this!” and walked away from it when seeing something so stupid?

So that was my choice, use TweetDeck, which works, is legible and doesn’t give me a headache, but shuts me out of Twitter, or MetroTwit which sort of works, doesn’t shut me out of Twitter, but is a pain in the neck.

Until today, when I figured out that using TweetDeck while having MetroTwit running in the background gave me the best of both worlds – the mere presence of the latter seeming to force Twitter to behave itself.

However, MetroTwit is something of a memory hog, and trying this if you’re running XP on the suggested minimum of 512MB is a recipe for trouble (and yes, there are people who do that, aren’t there, Alan?).

So, until such time as something else Twitter-related goes belly-up, the problem of Twitter Jail appears to be solved for me, at least.

Inevitably, someone will post a comment saying this is rubbish, they don’t use TweetDeck and still have a problem with Twitter Jail, to which I can only say, tough! This is my specific solution to this specific problem. It is, as the title says, A solution, not The solution.

Update, February 10 2012: And maybe not a solution any longer, see this post.