patriyprice: Tweetbot for Mac review

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Tweetbot for Mac review

Tweetbot for Mac is here! After a public alpha followed by a public beta, Tweetbot has officially been released in the Mac App Store. Everything you love about Tweetbot for iPhone and iPad including the familiar interface, gestures, and sounds, are now brought to the Mac and the experience is exactly what you'd expect -- wonderful.

The look and feel of Tweetbot for Mac is similar to the iPhone and iPad version of Tweetbot, yet tweeked to be more appropriate for the Mac. The left hand side has a column of tabs that take you to your timeline, mentions, messages, favorites, retweets, mute filters, and more. You can change the size of the window to fit your needs -- from short and skinny to wide and tall. Tweetbot for Mac also lets you open different tabs and views in new columns and windows, including the timelines of multiple accounts, so that you have many screens available simultaneously, as shown in the screenshot above.

Tweetbot for Mac supports shortcuts and gestures to make the desktop Twitter experience quick, easy, and natural. For example cmd+n will create a new tweet, cmd+r will reply to the selected tweet, a swipe to the right will open conversation view, and swipe to the left will open the tweet detail view. And instead of Tweetbot for iOS' trademark action drawer, if you hover over a tweet icons that let you reply, retweet, mark as favorite, share, and more overlay on top of it.

When creating a new tweet or replying to an existing tweet, a little window will popup that looks like a speech bubble coming from the new tweet button or the tweet you're replying to. It will move around, staying relative to the main Tweetbot window, unless and until you tear it off and reposition it somewhere else. When replying to a tweet, the popup will also display the conversation associated with that tweet underneath the text entry field. This is a great reference and helps you keep track of the conversation at hand.

There are many adjustments and tweaks that can be made in Tweetbot for Mac's preferences including sounds, font size, display name, date format, quote format, and the option to pin the timeline to the top so that you don't have to scroll to see new tweets -- they just appear as they come in. Tweetbot for Mac also supports multiple accounts and lets you choose URL shortening, image upload, video upload, read-later, and sync (including iCloud) services individually for each one. You can also select if you want notifications for mentions, retweets, favorites, and follows.

Now the price. Tweetbot for Mac is $19.99, which is substantially more than the iPhone or iPad version. Unfortunately, during the Tweetbot for Mac alpha period, Twitter changed their Rules of the Road to greatly restrict the amount of user tokens third party apps could use. That means Tweetbot for Mac will only ever be able to activate a limited number of users, which means a limited number of customers. If you have a limited resource and a limited market, prices go up. You can't spread development and support costs, and profit margins out over a huge quantity of users, so each user pays more. Tapbots is pricing according to the market conditions Twitter has created, and they're probably not the last Twitter app maker that's going to have to do that.

Thanks Twitter.

The good

Very similar to Tweetbot for iPhone and iPad with the same gestures, sounds, and UI
Open multiple columns and windows
Notifications for mentions, direct messages, retweets, favorites, and follows
Four font sizes
Support for bitly, Instapaper, Pinboard, Pocket, and Readability
Mute filters
Support for multiple accounts
Double-tap Message tab to mark them all as read
Lists support
Search
Drafts
iCloud sync

The bad

Sometimes there is a delay when sending Tweets
Can only choose one read-later service

The bottom line

Tweetbot for Mac is the best Twitter app currently available for the Mac. If you're a big fan of Tweetbot for iPhone and iPad and also a Mac user, what are you waiting for? Download Tweetbot for Mac!