Installation

You get Nymphicus from the Mac AppStore so you don’t need to worry about installation – it just works (so lovely the Mac).

First start

On first start Nymphicus will open a first start assistent to give you the most easiest way of defining your accounts and view.

After you clicked next on the greeting window you get a second window with an authorize button. Click it to add your first account.

 

A new window will open asking for your login credentials of Twitter. As Nymphicus uses OAuth the username and password are never stored on your local harddisk but only an access token only being valid for Nymphicus for Mac. This token is stored in your keychain.
So enter your credentials and press the “autorize app” button.

After having successfully logged into Twitter you will get some digits as a one time valid PIN. Please enter this PIN in the textbox on bottom of the login window.

You now have successfully added your first account to Nymphicus and can now add more by pressing the if you would like to do so.

You might notice that the main window still stays empty and no tweets are shown. To get tweets shown you first need to add a first view (see below) to Nymphicus to declare what you want to see. We will do so on the next page of the assistent after you have pressed “Next”. In the following window press the “Create View” button.

This will open the new view creation window where you define a name for the view and select which kinds of tweets shall be shown. Select at least one checkpoint but feel free to select as many as you prefer.

You can then start over and create another view or go ahead to the end of the assistent. In the last window just hit the “Finish”-button and your main window will refresh and start showing all the types of tweets you selected for this view.

Now have fun 🙂

Views

So you now have a first account and a first view it’s time to give you some general explanations about the concept behind the views as this is the main new approach Nymphicus brings to Twitter clients. A view is a collection of tweets of different kinds and accounts collected to one timeline window to give you all the informations in one view you want to have together. Some examples which are already views we use in our daily live:

• All direct messages (all accounts)
• All mentions (all accounts)
• All about Nymphicus (incl. all of @liGhun as well as a search for #nymphicus)
• All about one account (timeline, mentions, direct messages and retweets)
• …

We are quite sure you will find your own personal perfect views quite fast when playing with this feature. Just create some views in the preferences and play with them. THey are all listed in the combobox on bottom of the main window so you can change you current view quite fast.
You might also read a little bit in our blog post we wrote when we introduced this revolutionary new feature of handling your Twitter data.

The main window

In the main window you see all the tweets of your currently selected view. If you saw the color picker next to your account in the preferences here is where you see what it is for. If you have a view with multiple accounts (in my example I have three of them) you can see with one look from which account a certain tweet has found its way into the view.

So let’s have a look at the different parts of the window:

1. The tweet content area showing the tweet text, it creation time (ago) and if you have chosen account colors the color of the account
2. Avatar icon of the author and if it is retweeted the avatar icon of the person having retweeted it
3. The search bar: enter some letters and your view will be filtered to those tweets having this text in it
4. Quick filter: As views can have any kind of tweet sources included you can get a limited view here for just a single type of items (like “I wanna see all direct messages right now”)
5. Open the preferences (we have spoken about them already in first start and views)
6. Manually refresh the sync with Twitter. Nymphicus syncs automatically every three minutes if you don’t use the streaming api. If you use streaming refreshing only effects searches and lists.
7. Write a new tweet
8. Open a search window (see below)
9. Change your current view
10. Favorite, retweet, reply to a tweet or send a direct message to the author (shown when you hover with the mouse over an item)

When writing a new tweet (or a direct message or a reply) you get the following window:

Here you can the following tasks:

1. Enter you text here
2. If you multiple accounts authorized in Nymphicus choose here which account you want to use to send the tweet
3. Shorten all links in the text
4. Upload an image (put the created link into the text area when done)
5. A counter showing how many characters are left until you hit the 140 char limit of Twitter.

 

User info dialog

When you click on a username in a tweet you get the following dialog

Here you see all the metadata of the user as well as all the recent tweets.
You can also follow or unfollow the user here with any of your account, add the user to one of your lists, block the user or report a spammer.

The search window

If you press the magnifier on the main window (or a hash tag) you can search in twitter. Additional to just search and find tweets you can save this search directly to one of your accounts on bottom of the search window.

Preferences

When opening the preferences you get the following window with some tabs for different settings.

In the general tab you can define which url shortener you would like to use, which image uploading service shall be used and some more general options.

In the accounts tab you can add or remove accounts. Additionally you can define a per account color. This the color you see as border in the main window (see above) around every tweet. By defining different colors you can see with one click from which account a tweet found its way into your view.

In the views tab you can add and remove views to Nymphicus as well change the already existing.

On the filter tab you can add, remove change your filters. Filters in Nymphicus are always applied to a view. So when you define a filter (like I did in the screenshot – I would be happy if spam filtering would be that easy ;)) you define also on which view it shall applied.
In consequence you can have some types of tweets on multiple different views but filter them differently on them. Think about the possibilities…

And finally on the last tab you can add, change or remove lists from your accounts. Select you account on top, select a list (or create one by pressing the + button) and on the right side you can add and remove twitter usernames.