TwitterFun: The World’s First Mac Based Twitter Client with Integrated RFly.Me URL Shortening Support. [Updated (x2)]

Don’t look now, but there’s another Twitter client for Mac OSX which wants a spot on your dock.

Update [12/08/09 @ 17.28PM]

TwitterFun 3.0.2. Now Available.

- All New Interface.

Download it!

Update [12/08/09 @ 12.08PM]

We’ve just received word from Frank that TwitterFun for iPhone could drop as early as this December! Stay tuned. We’ve had confirmation the iPhone client will also boast RFly.Me integration.

Original Article

Designed by MacBuddy Support, TwitterFun is a new Twitter client for Mac which we’re really stoked about. Not just because it allows you to tweet to Twitter, oh no. Loren Britcher’s Tweetie can do that, and well.

No, we’re really stoked about TwitterFun because we gave Frank over at MacBuddy Support our soon-to-be public API, exclusively. What he did with it was phenomenal. He integrated RFly.Me URL shortening support into TwitterFun. Single-handedly making TwitterFun the world’s first Mac-based client with RFly.Me URL shortening support.

If you’ve been following either Me or James on Twitter, you’ll understand that we’ve been pushing for the developers behind the some of the largest Twitter clients for both Mac (and iPhone) to add RFly.Me as an option, for what now seems like – forever. We’re glad we can both finally say, you can now shorten a URL with RFly.Me, without the need for a physical browser.

TwitterFun as a Twitter Client

As a Twitter client, TwitterFun is what you’d expect. Opening the app you’ll be greeted with a nice black translucent interface, and your timeline. At the bottom left of the app you’ll find three little nicely designed buttons.

Going from left to right, the first is your refresh button. This refreshes your Twitter timeline. The second is your home button. This opens a new browser window and launches the Twitter homepage. The final button on the bottom tool bar is for TwitterFun settings, which we’ll get into later. To the right of this is the all important 140 character count.

Moving to the top left of the app, we have three further buttons. Reading from left right, the first takes you to your @replies or ‘Mentions’ tab. The second will take you to all the Direct Messages you’ve received. Both your @replies and DMs are currently limited, but on a quick count, each tab will display at least 150 of each, if not more. The last button in the row takes you back to your public timeline.

TwitterFun works on a highlight-to-function method. Meaning that highlighted tweets you select, become functional. The next set of buttons on the interface are all tweet-specific. Moving to the top right of TwitterFun you’ll see a further line of 4 buttons.

Again, reading from left to right the first one you’ll encounter (the star) is your favourite toggle button. This will toggle the selected tweet as a favourite, or un-favourite. The next one (the globe) will launch a new window and redirect you to the website of the person of the tweet you currently have selected (if that makes sense). The third button along from the left starts your message with ‘D’. If you not familiar with this method, it’s basically Twitter’s default way to send a direct (or private) message to someone, without actually having to enter your DMs tab.

Settings

Moving into the settings panel of the application, you’ll find a lot more customization as far as timeline, notification and shortcuts go. Entering the settings panel, the options are categorized into just that: General, Timeline, Notification and Shortcuts.

The general tab houses the most frequently used settings for Twitter Fun. These include:

- Always on top (Choose whether you wish for TwitterFun to remain on top of all your application windows, at any one time.)
- Use mini tweet view (Condenses tweet layout to smaller readable bars)
- Use classic tweet view
- Disable animation (Improves application performance)
- Hide dock icon (requires application restart)
- Swap menu bar behavior
- Disable window shadow
- Hide on deactivate

Below this is the Twitter authentication login form. Simply input your login credentials. once you hit ‘Close’ on the settings tab, a progress bar will display for a few second to the bottom right of the app, signaling it’s logging you in.

Moving on to the notifications tab, you’ll probably be glad to see that TwitterFun supports Growl. From this tab you can enable a multitude of settings surrounding TwitterFun’s interaction with Growl, including:

- Disable and Enable Growl
- Disable tweet notifications
- Disable reply notifications
- Disable Direct Message notifications
- Disable Error notifications

and finally …

- Disable sound notifications

Wait. Sound notifications? That’s right. TwitterFun for Mac has sounds. Sounds when your timeline updates. Sounds when you receive a reply. Sounds when you receive a direct message. It even sounds when your tweet goes live to the twitterverse. Don’t picture horrible .wav loops though, as there’s none of that here. It’s clear Frank has researched these sounds. They’re all slightly different, and yet having used the app for roughly a few hours now, I know what each one means. That’s powerful.

Moving to the third tab along ‘Timeline’ (and our personal favourite) this tab gives you more than a few options to customise your timeline experience. Starting with five general settings including:

- Don’t display error messages
- Update after a post
- Receive replies from non-followers
- Use 12-hour notation
- Post message with Control + Enter (Defaulted to just Enter)

Below these you have a setting which will control the maximum number of tweets for you timeline. You can choose in increments of 100, running from 500 – 1000.

RFly.Me Integration

We first launched RFly.Me on Friday 8th May 2009, approaching the URL shortening services market with our own angle. Debuting a service that would not only allow URL’s to be shortened but also email addresses and short to long notes. The response to the service has just blown both I and James, away. In a market that is so blatantly saturated, we never even began to think about reaching 200 shortened URLs. Yesterday, we officially surpassed 2000.

Today, we’re proud to announce TwitterFun is the first Twitter client (Both for Mac and iPhone) in the world to support our URL shortening service, and we really couldn’t be more happier to officially endorse and be working with Frank and MacBuddy Support.

Again. Thank You. We couldn’t have done it without you guys shortening, and we’re really glad most of you like the service (but more importantly) enjoy using it. RFly.Me is a free service, and will remain that way – we do it to offer a service we think you will enjoy, and as James said in our ‘RFly.Me: We’ve passed 2000 URLs‘ article, we have plenty more planned.

The Shortcuts Tab

The shortcuts tab allows you to set those key combinations you all know and love – which are also about to get whole lot easier with the debut of Keymote from Iced Cocoa. TwitterFun allows you to set a few keyboard shortcuts, including:

- Quick post
- Quick read
- Select oldest unread tweet
- Also hides if already reading

Conclusion

So there you have it. TwitterFun in a nutshell. It’s available for download for free, with a donation store said to be hitting shortly. On Windows or iPhone? Fear not! TwitterFun is also on it’s way to both Windows and the App Store. Although Frank hasn’t set a specific release date, or divulged any pricing details (if any) with RazorianFly for these additional versions, we can tell you for certain, they are on the way!

“@macbuddydev First impressions after just a few minutes: Really enjoying it. Nice UI Easy to use. Love the sounds! Seriously great job!”

- James (@HereIsJames)

Follow MacBuddyDev on Twitter.

Download TwitterFun below. Free.