Just as promised last week, the new Tweetie for Mac (Mac Twitter client) application launched today. It’s made by atebits – who of course also brought us the iPhone Tweetie app – which has been my favorite iPhone Twitter client for months now.
I’ve been using Tweetie for Mac this morning – first in its free version (with ads that really are not very intrusive at all) and now with a full registered version for $14.95. Although the app is not perfect by any means, it instantly feels more comfortable to use than Twhirl, Tweetdeck, or any other desktop Twitter app I’ve tried on the Mac.
Some things I like so far about Tweetie for Mac:
- As I’ve seen others comment when posting sneak peek type articles over the weekend, it just feels like it really belongs on a Mac, much moreso than any of the Adobe Air clients.
- That it keeps everything – timeline, @replies, direct messages, search – in a single column, and lets you pull out separate little widget-like windows for actions like composing a new tweet, replying to others etc. This lets me run it in one space alongside the Adium IM app without having the Twitter client take up the whole desktop – and also just feels more elegant to me.
- It places an icon in the Mac’s top status bar. Clicking this while in any other app takes me straight to Tweetie – clicking again toggles off the display of Tweetie’s window (click again to bring it right back).
- A right-click on any message in the Timeline or Public Replies views gets you a nice short menu with options to Reply, Repost (retweet), Direct Message, copy a link to the tweet, mark that tweet as a favorite, or open it in a browser. It took me a while to notice this feature, but once I discovered it, I’ve become very fond of it.
- You can use the up and down arrows on the keyboard to move around in the Timeline and Public Replies views.
- It looks great.
Some things I don’t like so much / would like to see improved:
It still uses the ‘via username’ method when retweeting, rather than RT which is much more the standard and is so much shorter. There should definitely be an option to change this.
The button for composing a new tweet is tiny (see screencap below to see how tiny). This one seems like a sort of beauty over function error to me. I would far rather have a constant text input window at the bottom of the window, or just a much larger button.
It doesn’t yet have sounds and alerts. I’m not keen on getting alerts every time there are new messages in the timeline – but I’d like to see some for when a new @ reply or DM comes in.
Search – as in search for a keyword or term – has its own section in Tweetie’s main window, but if you want to lookup a user, you have to find the command under the Twitter menu. This seems to me like a very common search activity, and should merit a place within the main window in my opinion.
So I guess – despite a few things I’d like to see changed – Tweetie for Mac is an instant favorite for me. I’ll be very surprised if this isn’t my favorite desktop Twitter app for a long time to come. Oh, and I can’t wait to see what Tweetie for iPhone Version 2.0 will bring …
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