We have a web filtering appliance installed as part of our network at my place of work.  Among the many functions it performs, packet shaping and filtering is one of the most important, and most annoying.  In our setup, port 443 (https) isn’t heavily restricted, so I use port 443 where available for any software I want to bypass the appliance and its rules.

Mail.app, iChat, Mailplane, etc all have options in their preferences to set alternate ports, while Twitterrific does not.  However, through a simple .plist hack we can tell Twitterriffic to use https traffic.  Navigate to and open the following property list file:

~/Library/Preferences/com.iconfactory.Twitterrific.plist

If it does not already exist, add a new Child property and call it “protocol” (all lower case, no quotes).  Set the class to String, and the value to “https://” (again, without the quotes).  Quit Twitterrific if it’s open, relaunch and voilá, you’re now connecting to Twitter over the secure http protocol.

Your results may vary if your LAN administrator blocks Twitter packets, or has other means of restricting traffic on port 443, but it’s worth a shot.