Tweetie for Mac OS X: TUAW Hands-on

Direct messages are displayed in bubbles like in iChat, which is neat.

The menu bar icon turns blue when you you have new information in your timeline, replies tab or direct messages. Already, plenty of users are asking for Growl support. I turn Growl support off in Twitterrific, so it is really going to be depend on your individual workflow.

Advanced Features

Multiple accounts is one of the marquee features of Tweetie for the iPhone, and it is just as nice for Tweetie for the Mac. Handling multiple accounts on the desktop is generally a cumbersome process (there are exceptions) that I usually avoid -- using my iPod touch to access secondary accounts instead. Tweetie for Mac makes handling multiple accounts easy, and tweeting from various accounts easy as well. If I want to retweet something from my @film_girl stream to @theflickcast, I can do that.

In addition to multiple accounts, having the ability to search Twitter from within the app or go directly to a certain user will make TweetDeck fans happy. The ability to save searches isn't available right now (though I wouldn't be surprised to see it added in the future), so heavy TweetDeck users won't be completely appeased.

One of my favorite features of Tweetie for Mac is the universal Tweet shortcut. I've mapped mine to ⌘T (CMD-T) so that I can quickly tweet no matter what app is currently in focus. I've also mapped hiding Tweetie to Shift-Command-T, so that I can hide the app when it isn't in use. This helps me be more productive. TweetDeck is nice, but I always get the feeling that I'm spending all my time staring at Twitter, instead of you know, working.

For fans of user groups, Tweetie doesn't have any implementation the way Nambu and TweetDeck do. I've been clamoring for user groups in Twitter for over a year, and while it would be nice to see an implementation in Tweetie, I'd actually rather see the implementation in Twitter itself first.

You can choose what URL shortening and what photo-appending service you want to use with Tweetie. There's also a nice Tweetie-bookmarklet available here.

Final Thoughts:

The separate window approach for tweet creation isn't going to appeal to all users. It doesn't bother me, but I can see plenty of people preferring the attached-window approach of Twitterrific. Likewise, although there are keyboard shortcuts to reply and re-post tweets, access other areas of the interface and whatnot, I hadn't found an easy way to hit the "send" button on a tweet without using the mouse until other people began mentioning the CMD-Return shortcut today.

Overall, I'm really pleased with Tweetie for the Mac. After using it for the better part of the weekend and playing with version 1.0 this morning, this is really shaping up to be a great app.

Tweetie for Mac is $14.95 US (introductory price through May 2, 2009) for an ad-free version; an ad-supported version is free (similar to Twitterrific's pricing option). Tweetie requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel or PPC) and is available now.