Beyond the post Oprah-on-Twitter hype, the majority of folks I know and chat with on a regular basis are tweeting business as usual. So while Ashton, CNN, and Oprah were getting headlines and new Mac Twitter app was being chatted about in my Twitter stream.
Tweetie for Mac is a desktop app brought to you by the same folks who brought us Tweetie the iPhone app. The first public beta dropped today, and despite my attempts to get it early, I had to wait until today to give it a try. I figure I’m not the only one since there was a good amount of “Tweetie for Mac” related chatter on Twitter. Not surprising after reading several pro-Tweetie posts: louisgray.com: Tweetie Desktop for Mac Is Clean, Simple and Robust-Tweetie’s Desktop App for Mac Has Potential, Integrates Conversation Tracking | SheGeeks-First Look: Tweetie for Mac | Take A Plunge
The first thing that I knew would be a problem is the lack of support for grouping people you follow. This was no surprise given an earlier post from the Tweetie developers-Twitter Groups-which douses some seriously cold (and snarky) water on using groups. Personally, “unfollow people” doesn’t cut it as an information management strategy. Even if I only followed 100 people, I’d still want to group my tweets into News (CNN, BNO, ZDNet, etc), Friends, and maybe one other category. This is just smart information management. Yeah I could have say four accounts to manage my info streams this way, but frankly that would be a royal PITA.
When I launched Tweetie for Mac this morning I tried it with one of my work accounts that I use to push posts out into Twitter. Few followers, few updates, so the info demands would be small.
I will say that Tweetie didn’t disappoint in terms of UI and slick style. It certainly looks great. As expected, no groups, but well I pretty much banked on that so okay. I ran into a show stopper when I tried to add my primary Twitter account. Yeah I guess it doesn’t like long, complex passwords. After making sure that I had the password right after the first authentication failure, I chalked this up to a first-release bug.
My verdict: I’m going to wait for the next release so I can give it a full-on test. So what about my other preferred desktop apps Nambu and TweetDeck? I’m flipping between the two of them right now. Both of them have a groups feature and are multi-column layout enabled which are two key things for me as a heavy Twitter user, the problem I’m having is that Nambu is still a might buggy and has a memory leak somewhere because when I leave it open for a while, it can gobble up a gig of ram after a few hours. TweetDeck has a similar problem, which has been squashed for the most part I’ve found.
As far as UI I like Nambu better. Even though I can’t move columns in Nambu like I can in TweetDeck I can set up a four column layout and use the pull-down menu to change what is displayed in each column. Verdict: too close to call.
For me the lack of groups is something that kills a Twitter app for me. I just need them to organize info. Does everyone need groups? Of course not, not everyone follows 4800+ people. At this point I don’t know how I could cull the list, short of using UnTweeps, with that many pages to go through.
[Took a break for a meeting]
By the time I got back to my desk there was Tweetie 1.0.1 and I could use it with my primary, and ginormous, account. Again, it looks lovely and is very responsive, but without groups it’s not the app for me.
The question then becomes, are Twitter groups in a client a must-have option for a Twitter app or just for the edge cases?
Pingback: The Perfect Twitter Client: What Apps Are You Tweeting With? | Blog of Mr. Tweet