EventBox – a quick look

EventBox is a nice new piece of software for OS X from Cosmic Machine LLP that allows aggregation of several social networks into a single “box” or window.

It’s a native piece of software so it is fast and really well integrated into OS X.  It supports spell checking, grammar checking, copy/paste undo etc…  All of the things you would expect in a normal OS X application.  It supports Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Flickr,  and Rss for now.  I’m primarily using it for Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.  I configured Reddit but the fact that Reddit shows in the overall unread count makes the unread items pretty useless on the dock icon so I had to unconfigure Reddit for now.

The Twitter container offers a good bit of functionality with ad hoc searches and profile viewing.  You can enter an arbitrary user name to check on their timeline and then follow them or just read the past timeline.  I like to keep a search for @vkoser going as well as a few other searches that allow me to keep up with specific things on twitter that I’m interested in and these stay persistent in the sidebar as individual containers under twitter that allow them to refresh periodically.  All of the standard things are supported, direct messages, replies, retweets, a built in url shorten-er with several service choices and more.

There is an overall unread container at the top of the left pane that will display unread items in all of your configured services in chronological order.  The development build I’m using right now has a HUD also that will pop up displaying new items.  The HUD overall seems good but I think it needs some further tweaking to be great.  Below is a screenshot of the HUD as it exists now in the development build I’m running.

EventBox is still in beta and there is a lot of work being done to it every day as they enhance it.  They are working on RSS syncing and support for del.icio.us, Last.fm and Orkut and many other things.

I listed a few dislikes below that I’ve been seeing after using EventBox heavily for a week and I have gotten some feedback from the developers that they are looking into them.  The development build I’m using now has solved a few issues that I was having.  Overall I love it and can’t imagine not using it now that It’s become part of my regular routine.  EventBox is currently on sale for $15.00 until the stable release comes out.  If your an OS X user I’d suggesting picking up a copy while It’s on sale.

Like:

• Aggregation of all my social networks into one Box or Window
• Spell/Grammar checking
• Easy to use inline url shortening, paste and hit ctrl-j to shorten
• Powerful searching
• Arbitrary username viewing/following
• Profile peeking
• A really slick menu bar icon that expands out like rss bookmarks in firefox

Dislike:

• Reddit.com grouped into total unread count
• High CPU usage when the containers get lots of items in them 500+ and you scroll This has been taken care of in the latest build and seems to be acting normal compared to Mail.app and other applications
• No multi account support for different twitter accounts (I’d like to see this implemented by just adding more containers on the fly for each account)
• The HUD pops up even if EventBox is in the forground, this is probably just a bug in the version I’m using