The Most Popular Twitter Clients for Mac
The Twitter community seems to be riddled with Mac users (or at least that’s how it seems to me, since I follow a ton of them), and a lot of them stick to one client religiously. The other day, I held a poll asking all my followers what their favourite Mac twitter client was, and the response was essentially pretty unanimous – Tweetie.
Tweetie for Mac was released last month to widespread acclaim, garnering a top Trending Topic place on Twitter, and incessant talk for days. I waited until after all that calmed down to try and get some honest poll results, and it still comes out to Tweetie as number one.
Now, I didn’t get a huge response. All in all, I only got… Five responses. Three out of those five said Tweetie, with one user noting that they wish they could delete tweets and DMS. Other than that, no complaints.
I also got one response saying Twhirl/Tweetdeck and another response saying Twitteriffic. Unfortunately, both Twhirl and Tweetdeck are Adobe AIR applications, which don’t really relate to the question, seeing as I was asking for Mac apps (implying native Mac apps). Regardless, I’ll put them in here for some counter-argument.
I’ve tried all of the listed clients, and none of them have been as satisfactory to me as Tweetie. For one, the interface seems native to the OS, and fits in really nicely. Plus, the functionality seems to be much better than most other apps, with some coming close.
My second favourite is probably TweetDeck, with its multi-view dashboard that makes everything very easy to view at once. If I was stuck on a Windows machine (and I will soon be running Windows 7 on here), I’d probably use TweetDeck.
What are your favourite Twitter clients for Mac?
I was a bit surprised that nobody said Nambu when I asked.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 9:27 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Connor
I'm Connor, a long-time writer and Mac fanatic. Software is a huge part of my life, and I spend every day finding new applications for my computer to help improve my workflow and my digital life, which I then tell you about to help you do the same. I don't consider myself an expert; just an educated enthusiast.
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Nambu & DestroyTwitter are really nice Mac OS X apps. Tweetie.. Just doesn’t fit for the Mac platform. It’s as if they just transferred the iPhone UI directly to the Mac platform. I feel that a Twitter application should be small and unseen. Hidden, like in the Menubar or Dock. And only shown when needed or shows notifications that contain things you can do like reply, retweet, etc.
@Teslanaut, Well, that’s the great thing about Tweetie for Mac. It has a great interface for when you need it, but when you just want to tweet real quick it’s very unintrusive. Because it has a global hotkey, you can just summon a little window to type in your tweet and you’re good to go. You really only have to open up the application itself when you want to check the stream, or you get a notification.
And personally, I don’t think it’s like the iPhone UI at all. I mean, I can see where you’re coming from, but it just fits the platform, I think. Not to mention, it’s a completely rebuilt application from the iPhone version, so it’s not just a lame port.
On another note, I haven’t tried DestroyTwitter yet, but I have heard some good things, so maybe I’ll give it a shot sometime.
@Connor,
The interface is just way too big for my tastes. I’d like it if it’d appear more like Quicksilver. Just a short momentary window pop for about 3 seconds. If I want to respond/retweet/fav etc, allow me to press a key combination or click the Window and do what I need to do. If I want to see recent tweets, let me click a small menubar item or dock icon or press a hotkey. The thing about Tweetie is, I can’t assign the hotkey to JUST F7. It HAS to be CTRL or Alt or CMD + F7. Not just F7. Whereas most other Twitter apps allow this.
As for the UI part, if you take a look at it:
http://img.skitch.com/20090515-npjgurkc7rq1pytshgakbicnjq.png
It’s just so big. So much unused space. It’s just unnecessarily big for my tastes.