Verso

It seems that the latest version of Tweetdeck (0.30.3) for the Mac does not appear to work properly with Greek characters. I have a simple ‘Greek verb of the day’ service set up using the Twitter API. It automatically posts an entry each day from a database of 1400 Greek verbs, including the three main tenses and with a translation in English.

In Seesmic Desktop or a browser it appears correctly:

But in Tweetdeck all Greek words are replaced with a ‘pi’ symbol (∏) like this:

Trying to diagnose the problem, I found when using Tweetdeck to compose an update that Greek characters are not recognised at all. That is, you can’t type anything on the keyboard when in Greek text entry mode: this is most unusual for a Mac application. It’s not a problem with AIR as Seesmic desktop seems to handle Greek characters perfectly well.

Whether this is a problem with all non-English characters sets I don’t know: this needs some further investigation. But anyone wanting to use Twitter for language teaching and learning will need to check whether it works with Tweetdeck. If you use the Twitter API to send automated updates, check that these are readable in Tweetdeck. And check that students can use Tweetdeck to post updates. I’ll be posting a note on my rimata homepage advising users that the ‘verb of the day’ may not be accessible using Tweetdeck on the Mac.