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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.

10,000 tweets

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Robin

Last night I posted my 10,000th tweet, although as I had been anticipating it, it was an announcement rather than just something random:

And this is my 10,000th tweet! Only taken almost 5 years…

— Neil Turner (@nrturner) May 21, 2012

I joined Twitter on the 1st of June 2007, so it’s taken me a mere 11 days shy of 5 years to tweet that much. My blog post at the time implied a little animosity – perhaps because this was yet another social network to join. I’d only joined Facebook a few months previously. And I don’t think I imagined Twitter would become as popular as it has today.

Although 10,000 tweets over 5 years implies 2,000 tweets per year, it’s probable that my tweet rate (number of tweets per day) has been much higher over the past 18 months, what with having a smartphone that can tweet at any time. Before, I’d have to use a computer or send a text message.

Whether I’ll still be using Twitter in 5 years remains to be seen, but it’s done well so far.

App of the Week: Osfoora

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I’ve reviewed several Twitter clients over the past couple of years, and just over two years ago I had a look at Tweetie, which was a freemium Twitter app for Mac OS X and at the time my preferred choice of Twitter client. The developer of Tweetie later got hired by Twitter themselves and with the launch of the Mac App Store last year came an official Twitter for Mac client based on Tweetie.

Until recently this was my favoured Twitter client on my Mac, but having used Tweetbot on my iPhone for some time I felt that I wanted a more powerful desktop Twitter client too. Osfoora had just been launched, so I gave it a spin, and I have to say I’m impressed.

The interface is apparently very similar to Twitterific, a veteran Twitter client that I’ve never really used before, but it’s also very similar to the official Twitter for Mac app so users should feel quite at home with it. I’ll therefore focus on what sets it apart from the official app.

Firstly, it supports the rather useful Tweet Marker service, which lets you bookmark your position when reading through your timeline. If you read every tweet in your timeline and use multiple devices (like a PC and a smartphone), Tweet Marker allows you to read some tweets on your phone (while travelling home on a train for example), and then pick up where you left off on your PC at home. Tweetbot also supports this on the iPhone. It’s a free service but donations are requested.

Moving on, as you’ll see in the screenshot, thumbnails of images in tweets are shown inline, so that you can easily see a preview before clicking them to view them full size. This is good as sometimes you’ll click on an image that looks interesting to find that it’s actually rather boring, or worse, an announcement that you’ve lost the game (sorry). Popular image services like TwitPic, yFrog, Instagram and Twitter’s own image hosting service are supported.

When composing a new tweet, you can include the title of the current song that you’re playing in iTunes by simply clicking a button, and like with the official client typing ‘@’ allows auto-completing of Twitter handles if you want to mention someone.

In terms of more advanced features, support for Read It Later and Instapaper is included, so you can save interesting links to these services for later reading. This isn’t as useful as it is on a mobile app, but I’ve still found myself saving links for later reading. You can also ‘mute’ specific usernames, in case someone you follow starts tweeting more than usual about something that you don’t care about and want a bit of a break. Conversely, you can also have tweets from other usernames highlighted, if you feel they’re more important than other tweets on your timeline. Unlike Tweetbot, Osfoora doesn’t yet support the muting of hashtags (which is useful when TV shows like X-Factor are on) or muting of clients (to hide tweets about what TV shows people are watching, what games they are playing or where they’ve checked into on Foursquare, for example). This would be useful to me.

Like most third-party clients, you get a choice of URL shorteners, rather than using Twitter’s own, although CloudApp is currently the only other one supported – no support for bit.ly, for example. Similarly you don’t have to use Twitter’s own image hosting service if you don’t want to.

Osfoora doesn’t yet support live streaming – tweets are refreshed on a schedule. However, this can be set to every minute if you wish, and support for live streaming should come in a future update. A nice touch is that a small message briefly appears at the bottom of the timeline stating how many tweets were received at the last refresh – although Osfoora also supports Growl notifications, I find this less jarring.

Finally, there’s support for multiple Twitter accounts, although each account gets its own timeline window. You can hide them though, or just use one window and use a keyboard shortcut to cycle through them.

Osfoora is £2.99 from the Mac App Store. It’s also available on iOS, but I haven’t tested it as I’m happy with Tweetbot at the moment.

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.

App of the Week: TweetDeck

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This week I’m looking at TweetDeck, although specifically I’m focussing on TweetDeck for iPhone. I actually don’t like the desktop version so much – I can see why it’s used by professionals, especially those looking after Twitter and Facebook accounts for brands, but it’s overkill for me. But the iPhone app, whilst more limited in scope, is a very nice little app, and beats out the official Twitter app in my view.

(I say ‘official’ – TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter back in May so it’s arguably also an official app – but there’s a proper Twitter client for the iPhone)

Most Twitter apps work in largely the same way, and as TweetDeck isn’t much of an exception I won’t go into too much detail about the basics – I’ll focus on what sets it apart and why I use it as my main Twitter client whilst on the move. Like most Twitter clients, you get columns for your stream (people you follow), mentions, and private messages, but TweetDeck lets you add others, such as searches or hashtags. I have a fourth column which shows tweets tagged with ‘#4sqsu’, in case another Foursquare superuser has tagged something important, which is quite useful.

TweetDeck includes support for ‘proper’ retweeting of other peoples’ tweets, but also lets you use ‘classic’ retweeting where you stick ‘RT @example’ at the front of the tweet. It also supports deck.ly, a service that lets you tweet more than 140 characters, in a transparent way that doesn’t require browsing to the deck.ly site – although as most other clients don’t support it, if you use it regularly you’ll probably annoy some of your followers.

A big feature, however, is Facebook integration. Status updates (and a few other things) appear alongside tweets in your timeline stream, and you can post status updates to Facebook from within the app itself – in fact, you can post the same thing to Twitter and Facebook. This is great for people who use both services, as you can read both at the same time. There’s also basic read-only Foursquare support, which shows some of your friends’ checkins, although the feature is a bit half-baked and you can’t use it to check-in.

I really like TweetDeck and as such it’s my preferred Twitter client. It’s a free download from the App Store should you wish to use it yourself.

App of the Week: Tweetie

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This is the second in a weekly look at an application I’ve been using lately and come to like. All of them will run on Mac OS X but some will be cross-platform.

It should be no secret by now that I like using Twitter. I’ve been a user for almost 3 years, sending my first tweet in late spring 2007. Twitter can be used quite well from the web but it’s real power comes from its API and the multitudes of applications which can make use of it. Tweetie is one such application – it began as an iPhone application and made the move to OS X last year.

Considering there are so many Twitter clients out there, what made me choose Tweetie? Firstly, it has a free version, which is supported by a few ads in your Twitter timeline (these are obvious and less frequent than I expected) and an occasional nag screen asking you to upgrade. Paying $19.95 removes the ads and the nag screen but doesn’t provide any extra features. It’s also built natively for OS X, unlike a number of others which use Adobe AIR – while this does allow them to run easily on Windows, OS X and Linux, in my experience AIR apps are quite slow and memory-hungry. Adobe have promised improvements to AIR so this may change.

Tweetie also supports multiple Twitter accounts – useful if you have a personal account and an account for your business, for example – although I personally don’t make use of this. The interface is very Mac-like, and it includes Growl notifications for new tweets which are useful if you want to be distracted whenever new tweets are received. It also has built-in search and you can view a Twitter user’s feed in the app by clicking their userpic. Support for URL-shortening services and TwitPic/yFrog is built-in too.

Tweetie’s use of animation makes it feel very smooth and slick, and it seems like the best-designed Twitter application I’ve used so far. It’s light enough to run at all times, and can be run just as a dock or notification icon.

It’s not perfect – it doesn’t support the new Retweet mechanism yet (so when you retweet it still posts ‘RT’ in front of a new tweet by you) and doesn’t show trending topics. There’s also no geolocation features, although this is of limited use for a desktop client.

I recently switched to Tweetie after having used EchoFon for Firefox, which I now can’t use due to bug 533535 in Firefox 3.6. But Tweetie offers much better features so I’m planning to stick with it. The Twitter client arena is very crowded but Tweetie sticks out as a very good application.

Been away, going away…

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I’ve been away from this blog for some time – 2 weeks almost – which is mostly due to being busy at work and having very little free time at home. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft a bit more than usual lately, but now have a second level 70 character as a result.

So what’s happened over the past 2 weeks? Well, based on my recent Twitters, here’s what I’ve been up to:

  • Been testing out Firefox 3 RC1 and Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1. Firefox 3 is looking really good now, especially on Macs where the improved performance and native theme make it even more of a joy to use. Thunderbird is obviously an early alpha build but it too is much faster, as it inherits many of the optimisations that were undertaken for Firefox. Unfortunately, it’s not yet very stable, but it is at least usable.
  • Now that I have more than a smidgen of free space on my MacBook, I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron in Parallels. Unfortunately, despite updating to the latest Parallels release, the Parallels Tools for Linux package doesn’t work with this release of Ubuntu so there’s no adaptive window sizes, cursor integration and clock synchronising. It’s a shame as apparently VMWare Fusion does support the latest Ubuntu release. I haven’t played around with Ubuntu much but it looks good, and including Firefox 3 is a bold but welcome move.
  • Speaking of Twitter, I would recommend the TwitterFox extension if you use Twitter and Firefox, as it’s quite a handy little extension which lets you read and interact with your Twitter friends. It doesn’t have masses of features, but it’s intuitive and it works with Firefox 3 already.
  • Google Reader’s ‘Trends’ feature has an unexpected use as a way of digging out feeds which haven’t updated in a long time. I found one that had gone dead in October 2005 that I was still subscribing to. I also found a few sites which had changed their feed URLs without redirects so I wasn’t receiving updates any more.

This, unfortunately, isn’t the return to regularly scheduled blogging, as on Saturday I’m going away for five nights in camping barn in the Lake District with some friends. It’s really in the back-end of nowhere – it doesn’t even have a connection to the electricity grid so all power comes from a hydro-electric generator, and it’s highly unlikely that there will be any mobile phone reception there either. So until I return on Thursday, you may not hear a peep from me, either on here or on Twitter.