tweetbot

Tweetbot for Mac in Alpha testing

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After not quite officially confirming its existence, Tapbots have released an alpha build of Tweetbot for Mac. I talked about Tweetbot for Mac last week and how it would be awesome, so I now have a chance to actually test it.

Firstly, don’t let the ‘alpha’ tag put you off. It’s not a finished product, and there are some bugs (the Tweet Marker support doesn’t seem to work), but in my view it’s ‘beta’ quality at worst. This is from someone who has done a lot of beta testing in my time, and who also spent part of the week battling some paid-for software that acted like a beta product – but more on that another time.

Secondly, apart from being still in the testing stage, feature-wise Tweetbot isn’t finished. There’s not yet any support for synchronising your Tweetbot settings between your Mac and your iOS device, as this requires use of iCloud and is therefore only available to apps from the Mac App Store that Apple has vetted. This will be in the final release but not in any public test versions. Tapbots also intend for it to support Notification Centre on Mountain Lion, which, as well as being another Mac App Store-only feature, is also not available to test because only a few select developers have copies of Mountain Lion at present.

It’s also worth pointing out that, whilst this alpha build is free to test, there’s no support; furthermore, the final product will cost money, as with the iPad and iPhone apps.

So, with those caveats pointed out, what it’s actually like to use?

Well, it works pretty much like any other Mac OS X Twitter client, to be honest. The main difference between the iOS app and the Mac desktop is that, whereas on iOS, tapping a tweet brings up a bar with buttons to retweet, reply and favourite, these now appear when you hover over a tweet with the mouse. But you’ll be pleased to know that the swiping gestures from the iOS app made it to the dekstop, so swiping from left to right shows the tweet details, and from right to left shows the tweet in a conversation view with its replies.

‘Streaming’ support, where new tweets are automatically loaded as they are posted, is enabled as standard. Along the left column, all of the various views are shown, like on the iPad app, so there’s easy access to your profile, lists, retweets and saved searches. And this desktop version of Tweetbot retains its formidable support for third-party services, so there’s integration with Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, Pinboard and bit.ly as a ‘read later’ service (most other apps just offer the first two and Readability if you’re lucky), plenty of third-party image hosting services (but not a custom one yet) and a choice of URL shorteners. And curiously for a desktop client, you can add a location to your tweets.

The other great thing, for me, about Tweetbot is its mute feature to hide tweets that don’t interest you, and this feature is also present on the desktop. So far, in this alpha, you can only mute specific Twitter clients, like Twittascope, RunKeeper, Waze, GetGlue or any other services which auto-tweet things that don’t really interest me, but eventually you will be able to mute specific hashtags or keywords, or put some users on mute – this is great when you follow someone who live-tweets a conference and would otherwise dominate your timeline. The mute settings will also be synchronised between clients when iCloud sync is enabled in the final release.

All in all, in my opinion Tweetbot as it is now – even in its alpha state – is still better than the official Twitter client for the Mac, and just beats out Osfoora which was my previous favourite (I reviewed it back in March). If you use Twitter on a Mac, and have Lion installed, give it a try whilst its free, and, if you like it, buy the final release when it comes out. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Tweetbot for Mac coming soon

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A screenshot of Tweetbot running on a Mac desktop

A couple of weeks ago, the above image was posted by Mark Jardine, one of the developers at Tapbots, showing off his new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. What’s notable is that it shows an OS X desktop version of Tweetbot, my favourite iOS Twitter client. This is big news, and Tapbots later confirmed to The Verge that a full mac version is under development.

To which, my response is “yay!”. I really like Tweetbot on my iPhone as it looks good, works well, and offers plenty of features. It can do everything that the official Twitter for iOS app can do, but will also let you use third party URL shorteners and image upload sites, and offers integration with services like Tweet Marker and Readability which aren’t often available in other Twitter apps. There’s also the ‘mute’ feature, which easily lets you mute certain hashtags that do not interest you, or particular clients like Waze, paper.li, Twittascope and various other services that auto-post things on your friends Twitter feeds that don’t interest you. You can also mute users, and you have the choice of muting them for a short period or indefinitely – great for when someone you follow live-tweets a conference that doesn’t interest you.

I haven’t yet found a desktop Twitter client for the Mac which does all of these things as well as Tweetbot, although Osfoora, my current client of choice, comes close. What excites me most is that Tweetbot is able to synchronise its settings using iCloud, for those that use it both on their iPhone and iPad, and so I’m looking forward to this extending to the Mac OS X app when it launches.

We don’t know much more about when Tweetbot for Mac will launch – there’s nothing about it on the Tapbots web site yet – but I imagine it’ll be after Mountain Lion gets released later this month (19th July). I’ll be almost certain to buy it, although I’ll happily keep on with Osfoora until then.

App of the Week: Tweetbot

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Back in July, I reviewed TweetDeck, which at the time I felt was the best combined Twitter and Facebook client for iOS. But recently a degree of bitrot has infiltrated TweetDeck such that it now crashes regularly on devices running iOS 5, and so I’ve been on the look out for a replacement. Whilst Seesmic offers one client which supports both Twitter and Facebook (along with ping.fm), it doesn’t integrate them as well as TweetDeck did – the timelines are separate.

Since I have the official Facebook app on my iPhone anyway, I decided to try alternatives, and Tweetbot by Tapbots had been recommended. Unlike other Twitter apps it isn’t free – it costs £1.99 on the UK App Store, and there’s no trial version with adverts. But, having used it for a couple of days, it is worth the investment.

The interface is a little different to other apps, as it uses its own interface widgets, rather than following the same design principles as standard iOS apps. But, it is arranged in a logical way, and it shouldn’t take long to get used to. The main tabs – your timeline, mentions and direct messages – are where you’d expect, and there’s easy access to your favourite tweets, retweets and your profile. It also has very good support for Twitter’s lists feature which other clients tend to skip.

A single tap on a tweet produces a menu below which allows you to reply, retweet or favourite it, or open a further menu to quote, copy, email or translate it. It will also activate any links or @mentions. You can also click the ‘view detail’ button which lets you view the tweet full-screen, and click to see who has replied to, retweeted or favourited the tweet. If a link in a tweet is an image, such as on TwitPic or yFrog, TweetBot will show it full screen, and it supports a large number of services for this.

When composing tweets, you can use either Twitter’s built-in link shortener (t.co) and its own image hosting service (pic.twitter.com), or you can use one of several third-party services. Tweets can be saved as drafts and you can add a location; auto-completion of hashtags and @usernames is also supported.

What makes Tweetbot stand out is its ‘mute’ feature. You can mute users, hashtags or particular clients either indefinitely or for a short period of time. So if you don’t want to see tweets from paper.li, you can mute it across all of the people you follow, but still be able to read their other tweets. Similarly if someone is tweeting more than usual and you’re not interested, you can mute them for a few hours without unfollowing them. And you can also mute hashtags – so if you don’t care about The X-Factor you can restrict the tide of tweets from the people you follow by muting the hashtag.

Finally, unlike some other third-party Twitter clients, it supports push notifications, so that your device will alert you to any new mentions or direct messages. You can also limit push notifications of mentions to people you follow, to reduce spam.

The only real downside is that it only supports Twitter – there’s no integration of other sites like Google+ or Facebook, which is a bit of a shame. However, it does support Twitter very, very well.

I’ve been really impressed by Tweetbot. It’s quite a new client – version 1.0 was only released in April of this year – but it’s being actively improved and enhanced and deserves more attention than it gets. The price tag will put people off, but if you don’t mind spending less than £2 then you won’t be disappointed.