Tweetie for mac

Last week provided an instresting thing in the world of twitter. Atebits released a mac version of their renowned iPhone app Tweetie. Granted I haven’t used Tweetie for the iPhone, that might work to our advantage as I try to dive into my first review.

Interface

Providing a small clean mixture of static and dynamic interface Tweetie is about as simple as you can get it. Laid out much like it is in the Twitter website by dividing it down into “Timeline”, ”Mentions”(or replies), “Messages”(direct messages), and “search”.

The timeline as you would expect is…laid out like a timeline. The style of the timeline is much like a chat in iChat with updates on the left and your updates on the right. Replies are colored a shade of blue. User updates include their picture and the name on the top of the tweet(something that Tweetdeck was lacking big time). Overall the time lines provides an easy and speedy(yeah its fast) way to scroll through hundreds of tweets.

The replies(aka “mentions”) time line is much like the main time line. Tweetie has a unique way of handling replies though. When someone @replies you it shows up under replies, but when you reply them back it puts it under a conversation. So I can go back to the time I had a long conversation I had about my Windows computer not working and see all that was said about it. Granted it only works when you reply back to them right after they reply to you. So if they tweet something after replying to you it would be put into a different conversation(and they get mixed together alot). But the concept still works pretty good.

Search works like search. With a spot light logo and a drop down menu for trends. Thats all I got.

I think it is time to talk about the track-back line at the top of the window. This nifty feature makes it easy to figure out how you got to the weird users account that you wish you haven’t found. See every time you click on a tweet it brings you to the users timeline from there you can click on other users and go to their account and so forth. But at the top of the window you will always know where you came from via arrows and user names. Pretty fancy right? Yeah I thought so too.

At anytime you can open any timeline into a serparate windows. Fancy when you want to keep updated on trend or a single person.

There are lots more things about tweetie when working with that I just can’t go into(like previewing tiny-urls and twitpic). But trust me on this, its easy to use.

Updating

Updating in Tweetie is easy. You click the post button in the bottom right corner, and it opens a separate window. Thats right a separate window. They say its so you can compose multiple tweets at once, but who wants to do that? They have an entire flow going on inside one window and then out of no where a new window pops out of the abyss. Yeah, I hate.

With that being said. As you can imagine it provides support for multiple different url shorteners(including the new Digg shortener). It also has support for multiple different image hosting for Twitter(Twitpic, Posterous, yFlog).

Plus you can select from the post window which Twitter account you want the tweet to go to.

Replying people is easy, you can do it under the timeline by hitting the reply button on a tweet. Or just do the standard @username in the compose window.

Other Features

The ability to have multiple accounts under one program is simply amazing. By dividing the two and still have everything manageable without getting confusing was critical, and Tweetie knocked it out of the water.

There are keystrokes for everything. Example Command+1 -> timeline, command+2 -> replies. This enables fast navigation around the program without letting go of the keyboard.

Overall

I like Tweetie, it has replaced Tweetdeck as my primary Twitter app. It’s got everything you would ever want from a Twitter app. and adds the simplstic interface thats very much like the main Twitter site. Worth $20? It depends on how much $20 is worth to you, for me I’m going to be using the ad based free version for awhile.

What do you think of Tweetie? What app is your primary Twitter interface?