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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TAGS: atebits, Tweetie, Tweetie for Mac
