Tweetie

For those on the MacOS wanting a great desktop app to manage your Twitter account, I would suggest checking out Tweetie and possibly the iPhone companion. It’s been my favorite Twitter app as of late over other apps like Nambu or TweetDeck. For me, I really love the condensed view of the Tweetie app which saves me desktop space versus the larger spread you get with TweetDeck or Nambu. For example:

(click to view)

By clicking Tweetie’s sidebar you can quickly jump from tweets you have composed, see replies, direct messages, and search. You can also use global keyboard shortcut to enter tweets. In my case I use CTRL+OPTION+COMMAND+T often to bring up a dialog to enter a quick tweet:

(click to view)

Notice that you can also use keyboard shortcuts to quickly convert long URLs to short ones. The only downside to using the keyboard shortcut is that the dialog only pops up in the Leopard Space from which you originally launched Tweetie (focus is switched to that Leopard Space as well). I was expecting the OmniFocus QuickEntry dialog behavior which works from any Leopard Space. I messaged the developer about this and the response was that it is not easy to do but is looking into it. If that can get fixed, I would be tempted to buy the app even though the ad-supported, free version is not that annoying.

2 Comments to Tweetie

1. 

   I just switched from Tweetie to Adium now that it has Twitter support. I like it mainly because I always have Adium open and having it in another tab is very unobtrusive.
Kevin McFadden on May 19th, 2009
2. 

   Yeah, that makes sense.

   My problem with Adium is that it seems too buggy to rely on. I also don’t have contacts across multiple IM clients and use Skype only. If I had to support multiple IM clients then maybe Adium would be of use to me.

   As for having Twitter in your IM client, that is interesting. Skype does that as well (via a plug-in if I remember correctly) but that seems wrong to me. In my mind those are two distinct forms of communication that need to be separated in order to reduce interrupts and stay focused on getting things done. That is how I reduce interrupts, at least.
Brooke Kuhlmann on May 19th, 2009

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