Twitter Clients For Mac
Twitter (Web, OS X): The official Twitter website is a marmite affair: some people hate it, while.
The official Twitter client for the Mac died yesterday. When you try and start it now it fails to authenticate any of your accounts. This is because Twitter announced recently that they were going to stop developing and supporting their client on the Mac in an attempt to people to use their Web-based client instead.
For me and I suspect many others I really don’t like using the web client. It’s something simple to do with it suiting the way I think and work but having Twitter in its own client app away from the work I’m doing in Safari suits me.
The official Twitter client for the Mac died yesterday. When you try and start it now it fails to authenticate any of your accounts. This is because Twitter announced recently that they were going to stop developing and supporting their client on the Mac in an attempt to people to use their Web-based client. YoruFukurou – Twitter client. A native Twitter client for Mac OS X. Dashboard views of incoming tweets, lists, and searches, split across multiple tabs. Comes highly recommended from Kottke.org. Happy Friends: Mailbox-type reader. Pick the friends you want to hear from. Never miss their tweets. There are many Twitter clients for the Mac, some of which are almost indistinguishable from others, but the official Twitter client stands out thanks to its focused yet comprehensive feature set. Tweeten is based on TweetDeck which means it offers a powerful, column-based interface that helps you keep track of everything that's happening on Twitter without needing to hit the refresh button. Tweeten enhances the TweetDeck design to offer a much cleaner and intutive experience.
Best Twitter Apps For Mac
So having looked at a few options I’ve bought TweetBot for the Mac and it seems fine and an easy transition. What I don’t understand is the business logic behind Twitter’s decision to kill their Mac-based client. For a company, the size of Twitter employing one or two developers to support a Mac client is hardly a significant investment. Most of the code base should be in common with their iOS version and the skillset is basically the same. There’s also the expectation that at WWDC 2018, the annual Apple developer conference that they will announce support in iOS and MacOS for universal apps. This will allow developers to create a single app that can be downloaded and run on Mac and iPhone for example. Why would Twitter kill the Mac client now rather than wait and create a good universal MacOS/iOS app?
In effect what Twitter has yielded control of thousands of influential Mac Users to third-party clients which they will struggle to control and gain advertising income from so easily.
When you see such irrational business decisions being made you have to wonder if there aren’t fundamentally more serious problems at Twitter.
Let me know what you think in a comment below.
We are in the age of Tweetie Twitter App, and this time the new Tweetie for Mac is available. This is the Mac version of the iPhone app that makes for the best Twitter client online. I have been trying it out, and here is my personal experience with this new Mac app.
Power Outage
If you are a Tweetoomaniac than this is not for you, the app does not have that Uber dashboard experience; you do not have control over every aspect. If you don’t mind sharing your screen with less exciting items, such as your details, then go ahead and use it.
Emerald Chat, the Omegle Competitor
Appearances are Deceiving
When you set up Tweetie for the first time, you might think its too simple to be any good. Well, settle back down and understand that the GUI is designed for a more simplistic and focused view. The client has a single column stream of incoming tweets and icons that provide most of the navigation, placed to the left. These icons are:
- @ for replies,
- Envelope for direct messaging,
- Magnifying Glass for search
Twitter Client For Mac
Apart from these buttons, navigation is simply double-clicking on a username for the most recent tweets or clicking on a hashtag to start a search.
Twitter Clients For Mac
The Devil is in the Details
If you want the prizes, then note that the resolution of details is great. For instance, when you click on any image that is provided by 3rd party services such as TwitPic, the app will pop up a display of the photo. Another great addition is the drag and drops feature, for instance, you drag and drop a photo from anywhere on your system into the Tweetie window and type your message with the limit of 280 characters.
You can also improve accessibility performance by adding hotkey shortcuts that work while you are using another application. The overall GUI is great too, since you can either continuously scroll while the app continues to add new incoming Tweets, and you navigate smoothly and seamlessly between screens.
Best Twitter Clients For Mac
There is another bonus, Tweetie allows you to open up any number of account windows simultaneously.
While Tweetie doesn’t support a two-columned UI, it does break search queries into separate windows, which is more useful than operating out of one large clustered window. The overall GUI is a bit stiff at first, just like anything new, it takes time to get accustomed to it, and it might still seem a bit constraining when compared to more versatile systems such as TweetDeck.
Now for the cons.
Tweetie’s search windows don’t open automatically. You will need to perform some tasks, which is tiresome, and they are:
- Click the search button
- Then go to the Menu bar
- Click the Open new window
Another issue is that you cannot pop out any ‘@mentions’ or ‘direct message’ into a specific window. Although we have been told that this feature will appear in the version 1.1 upgrade.
Another con is the hidden “follow” feature, for this, you need to go to the drop-down menu.
One final con is the lack of auto-complete for any Twitter handles, so this makes responding to common friends harder.
Conclusions
This is the Twitter client that all Mac users have been waiting for. It is much more advanced than the basic Twitterific. On the other side of the scale are the two resource hogs; TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop that use Adobe’s AIR platform, and we all know where that leads to. They are great and full of amazing features, but their presence creates some UI issues and does eat up a lot of Mac’s resources making operating other apps an issue.
Cost
Tweetie comes at a $14.95 price, which is ad-free, and you can get it free but with adverts.
Compatibility
If you don’t like Twitter clients, don’t get this one either. Twitter clients are all the same, and while they do compete for the Twitter client market share, they are not suitable for everyone.