To say that Tweetie for Mac is my new favourite desktop Twitter application would be completely incorrect. What I should really tell you is that I could not find an application to hold that title before Tweetie came along. Everything I tried before suffered from either serious problems in aestheics, overuse of screen real estate or poor user interface. Tweetie seems to have solved nearly all those problems and appear to be constantly improving their product.
Tweetie began as an iPhone Twitter application from the great people over at atebits. Tweetie for iPhone has been my default mobile Twitter application and it appears they have brought everything they learned on the iPhone into their new desktop program.
Tweetie has a very elegant design with large buttons for your Timeline, @ Replies or Mentions, Direct Messages and Search. The layout at the top of screen feels very familiar if you use the iTunes store, and shows where you’ve travelled if you start wandering through other peoples posts and replies. Conversations between yourself and other twitterers are very easy to follow and can be brought out into separate screens. These separate screens can also seemingly be used for many other aspects of the program as well. You can also view nearly full information on any twitter user who’s name is in your timeline, including profile photo, description, their posts, friends and followers. There are options for static or auto rolling scroll bar when new posts are made, as well as a menu bar icon that lights up when those posts arrive. For those power users Tweetie on both desktop and iPhone supports multiple accounts.
Tweetie for Mac comes in two flavours currently. One being the free version with very limited advertising presented in your regular timeline, the second being a paid version without advertisements for the price of $19.95, currently discounted to $14.95 as of the time of writing this post.
This application comes very highly recommended, and I can only imagine the beautiful things to come from the people at atebits with the support of dedicated twitterers who value the products they use.