Twitter + Mac Clients != Crazy Delicious
I’ve said this on Twitter and it remains true: There is one glaring thing wrong with every single Mac desktop client I have tried. Yes, ALL of them. I realize I could be alone in this, I looked for a stat and found that as of June 2009 the average Twitter user has 126 followers (this minute I’m at 2,416 following me, and I follow 1,413 as of today.) and of all Twitter traffic 80% is from the API (meaning programs that post to Twitter, not the website itself.) I keep trying apps and finding flaws and making do. I kept threatening to blog this so here goes: I’m going to list my problem with each of these apps. Usual disclaimers apply: Kelly is the exception, Kelly is not the rule, your mileage may vary, close cover before striking, do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate, not to be rebroadcast without the written permission of Major League Baseball.
Here is the list:
Twitterrific from the Iconfactory. I am a super Iconfactory fangirl. I love them love them love them. They were one of the first with a desktop client and I bought it after about 10 minutes of use. It squishes up really small, doesn’t spend a lot of UI on fancy junk I don’t need, has awesome keyboard commands, and just works. I also use Twitterrific on my iPhone and adore that too. This is what I want to be my first choice, and it is about half the time. But it’s lacking.
FLAW: While I like that it caches some of my recent replies and DMs, it does so at the bottom of the stream when I launch the app. After seeing how iPhone apps and other Mac clients do it, I want separate panes for replies and DMs, it’s easier to keep track and make sure I’m not missing anything. (I also have zero user management within the app: If I want info on someone I have to view the web page and do everything that way.)
Nambu. Nice layout, has a little “info” pane to show multiple accounts, mentions, DMs, all the stuff I want.
FLAW: There are “read” and “unread” tweets, and in the zeal to mark things read or unread I end up lost and overwhelmed SUPER fast. If new tweets load, it doesn’t save my place, and (if the option is checked,) simply scrolling marks things read so if I bounce back and forth to find my place I can’t rely on the indicators to show where I left off. If I turn off the scrolling = mark as read option, I still can’t find my place and now I have to select every single tweet as I go by so it’s marked as read.
Tweetdeck. This is the one most of the “power users” I know are running. They adore it. I went up a wall trying to figure it out. It’s also an app that runs on Adobe Air, so if you want to run this you have to install that first.
FLAW: Updates. After you install and launch it, Tweetdeck thinks you have no followers until they tweet. Eventually it learns who they all are. EVENTUALLY. I ran it for more than a week and it still wasn’t finding everyone. Even after they had updated a couple of times. I wanted to use the groups and the filtering but I lost my patience and ditched it when the easiest things I wanted to do (reply, dm, look up users) were hard to find and do.
Seesmic Desktop. Another Air application. I wanted to like this one too. Nice info pane, multiple accounts, etc.
FLAW: Conversation fail. If I want to retweet someone, reply to someone, or send them a DM I have to mouse over their user icon in a tweet, click the right one of the four options that pops up, and then try to actually do what I want to do. Icons aren’t clear, and I’m on a 13″ screen so my resolution is up as high as I can get it. I need all that room and making me pick a tiny little icon is aggravating. Since I can’t find any keyboard commands there’s no way around this.
BONUS: This sounds dumb but the scroll is super herkyjerky because it scrolls one tweet at a time, you can’t leave it “between” tweets at the top of the screen. And the readability issues with Nambu are similar here: No preservation of where I left off and new updates shift my position so I can’t keep track easily.
Tweetie:Mac. This is the one I’m currently using about half of the time (I alternate between this and Twitterrific), even though the flaw drives me nuts. User info and management is nice, reply and DM panes exist, along with search. Keyboard commands are handy.
FLAW: Reply and DM panes are FULLY threaded. Meaning if I have four replies, and I go to the oldest one and answer that, my reply makes it the newest in my list even though the incoming message (the part I care about) is the oldest one. WAY frustrating.
So there’s my complaints. If I’m wrong on this stuff or missing a preference or something PLEASE let me know! Or you know, if you are at the Iconfactory and want me to beta test your new glorious Mac version, let me know. I’d LOVE to have a client I can tell the whole word to go get.
6 Responses to “Twitter + Mac Clients != Crazy Delicious”
John DeRosa says:
August 12, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Nice summary. Two comments:
Nambu seems to be headed to history’s dustbin. The last three http://blog.tr.im/ blog posts contained many questions about the future of the Nambu app, and I take note that none, repeat none, of them were answered unambiguously by anyone from Nambu (the company). In fact, in http://blog.tr.im/post/159489555/tr-im-to-december-31-2009 there’s this comment: “Nambu will very likely be discontinued too, in that there will very likely be no more updates released, but no final decision has yet been made.”
All of which says to me that either (a) a decision’s been made to terminate Nambu (the app) and they’re waiting for the tr.im decision dust to settle before announcing it, or (b) at the very least Nambu’s (the app) neck is on the chopping block and a decision is imminent.
Tweetdeck requires installing Adobe Air. Some of us don’t want Adobe Air (*cough* bloatware *cough*) on our Macs. Different users will have different opinions on this, of course, but I think it should be noted as a “flaw” of Tweetdeck for some users.
(EDITED: John commented again with corrections to the grammar at the top of the post.)
mklprc says:
August 12, 2009 at 1:52 pm
My biggest complaint with Tweetie for Mac is the limited buffer. After a few hours (3 to 9 depending on how many tweets appear) it cuts old ones off the bottom. I want an unlimited buffer that saves all tweets for a couple of days, with an option to clear old ones out myself. It seems to have its own ideas about which mentions and DMs to save as well, and no preference to adjust.
Otherwise, I like the app and in conjunction with the Twitter web page, which I always keep open, most of my needs are met.
groonk says:
August 12, 2009 at 5:44 pm
you forgot https://destroytwitter.com/
verso says:
August 12, 2009 at 6:34 pm
I sort of forgot it, I don’t know a lot of people who use it so I don’t see it talked about much. I tried it once and never went back mostly because the thinking at the time (some months ago) was “Why use that when there’s TweetDeck?”
Andrew Hedges says:
August 14, 2009 at 4:12 pm
About 6 months ago, I started to create my own Twitter client out of frustration with the “state of the art” at the time. Tweetie for Mac cured me of most of my motivation. I have many accounts for various purposes (e.g., http://twitter.com/itlt to support a website I run) and Tweetie does a great job of making that painless. The thing I dislike about the app is that there are still things you have to do through Twitter.com. As long as that’s the case, I don’t consider it “full featured.”
strangeways says:
September 2, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I always end up going back to Nambu. I haven’t found any Adobe Air apps that I actually like, and I think Nambu’s interface is fairly intuitive. I do need to make sure the currently-selected tweet is at the point I’m reading so that I don’t lose my place when it updates, but otherwise I don’t have major issues with it.
Some other clients:
Mixero in an Adobe Air app that has a ridiculous number of features, but the interface is a bit much for me.
Lounge has a desktop beta client that looks good. There are lots of screenshots in this review.
EventBox looks promising and also functions as an RSS reader with support for syncing with Google Reader.
The Adium beta has Twitter support now.
On the iPhone I use TweetDeck and Twittelator. Nambu has an okay iPhone app, and I have yet to try Lounge’s.