SuccessWhale is a web-based Twitter client written in PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. It’s a multi-column client that will work just the same in any browser – even IE6. (And as far as I know it’s unique in that respect.) It’s free to use by anyone, and has no advertising.

Visit SuccessWhale.com to try it out!

Features

SuccessWhale has a three-column view, which by default shows your Timeline, your Mentions, and your received Direct Messages. At the bottom of each column is a drop-down menu that allows you to change the column to display a number of Twitter’s built-in feeds, plus your own Lists.

SuccessWhale is integrated with my Twitter pastebin, Twixt. Enter a tweet longer than 140 characters into the box in SuccessWhale, and it will be piped through Twixt automatically, preserving your @users and #tags. SuccessWhale also displays the contents of Twixt posts inline, and expands short URLs.

Screenshot

SuccessWhale Screenshot (click for full size)

Status

SuccessWhale is currently in beta, as is befitting a web app these days. Several people – myself included – use it as their day-to-day client. If you find any bugs or would like to request any new features, you can contact me on Twitter (I’m @tsuki_chama), or via my contact form. If you’d like to submit bug reports and feature requests directly into my Mantis server, please register an account and do so.

Licence and Source Code

SuccessWhale is licenced under the GNU GPL v3. You can download a copy of the source code here: SuccessWhale Source Code (ZIP).

This includes all the third-party code on which SuccessWhale depends, including twitteroauth, jQuery, the jQuery Form Plugin, the jQuery BlockUI Plugin and the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. (Certain parts of the SuccessWhale download are thus licenced under the MIT licence, which is more permissive than and compatible with the GPL licence that SuccessWhale itself uses.)

Installation

To run your own copy of SuccessWhale, unpack the ZIP file on a web server that supports PHP and, optionally, MySQL. Edit config.php with your own settings.

As explained in config.php, you’ll need a Consumer Key and Consumer Secret – you’ll get those when you register your app with Twitter. Optionally, you can also enter details for a MySQL database. If you use a database, the app will remember users’ column setup and will cache expanded links (speeding up loads somewhat). The app will create tables for you. If you don’t want to use a database, just leave “DB_SERVER” blank.

Then just navigate to index.php, log in with Twitter, and you should be up and running!

Thanks to…

• @abraham for writing twitteroauth, a PHP implementation of the Twitter OAuth API. SuccessWhale uses twitteroauth as its backend.
• @tikakino for the short URLs and Twixt expansion code, and for my introduction to jQuery.
• @aefaradien for providing the hosting behind successwhale.com, and for many bug reports.