A few weeks ago I picked up my new netbook, an HP Mini 311. I almost hesitate to call it a netbook, because it has an 11.6” screen, 2GB of RAM, and runs Windows Home Premium. So it’s more like an ultraportable notebook. Still, it rocks and is a big step up from my five year old Dell D400!

The screen on the HP Mini has a resolution of 1366x768. That means it’s great for watching 720p videos or for running applications that take a lot of screen real-estate, but it also means that the default font size is rather small. Windows has never been very good at scaling font sizes, and while Windows 7 is an improvement, I still don’t like switching to “large fonts”. Something about having the larger fonts in the Window chrome as well as the content just doesn’t gel with me.

So anyway, I’ve been looking at the various Twitter clients that are out there, trying to find one that was simple (not too many features that I won’t use) and supported custom font sizes. The one I like best so far is Sobees Lite (formerly known as bDule), but its user interface is rather “busy”.

So in the spirit of flooding the market, I’ve decided to write my own Twitter client.

The idea is that I’ll steal the layout and some UI from Witty (my favourite Twitter client) but change the feature set. I’ll strip back most of Witty’s features, and add one or two new ones (like custom font scaling, and support for native retweets). Like Witty, this will be a .NET 3.5 WPF project, using Visual C# Express 2010 and TweetSharp. Since it’s a scaled-down version of Witty, I’ve decided to call it Halfwit.

I’ve made good progress on it so far, and hope to have a version I can publish for people to try on the weekend. Stay tuned!