Application Camouflage

Spreadtweet is a cool little app from Elliott Kember which is a twitter client posing as Excel. Your boss can glance at your screen and never notice you keeping up with your twitter peeps.

(via Daring Fireball)

Comments

[Hywel Thomas]

Half annoyed, half pleased.

I emailed some friends about this idea exactly a month ago.

Half annoyed because yet again, I've failed to do anything about it (I had sketched designs for the Optimus keyboard (but using e-ink), in 2000, and did nothing with them).

Half pleased because I don't have to lift a finger now to get the office Twitter I had in my head onto my Mac.

[Vincent Gable]

Spreadsheets are numeric, but tweets are textual. So maybe a better disguise would be mashing the tweets together into paragraph-looking blocks of text, and putting it in a Mail or Word window? It wouldn't be as easy to read though.

[Keith Lang]

@Hywel

You don't have to make it, and its FREE!
(But a donation is welcomed)

@Vincent Maybe a command line looking interface, with a conversion to 1337 speak on the way?

[Hywel]

Excel is one of the main apps I use on a day to day basis at work. Not really numerically though, so this tabular representation of text looks perfect to me.

[Vincent Gable]

@Hywel,
That's good to hear. I was thinking too much about what I do with Excel, but I only use it occasionally, and I'm out of touch with the target audience here :-).

@Keith Lang,
Now I am curious how much like code text can look. Actually code might be a decent fit for twitter, since both kind of have some structure. Just adding whitespace to the HTML for twitter.com might get me pretty far...