Tweetbot for Mac - Public Alpha | Hacker News Reader

Tweetbot for Mac - Public Alpha

tapbots.com

139 pointsjforrest62 comments

I wonder whether fear of a Twitter crackdown on third-party clients played any role in the timing of this. Having an app, even an alpha app, in users' hands would increase the outcry if Twitter were to move against third-party clients like Tweetbot. (Obviously, I mean an outcry in addition to the userbase for the polished iOS client.)

This is purely speculative, I admit.

I will say this: I consider myself to be a Tweetbot user, not necessarily a Twitter user. If Twitter cuts Tweetbot off, and Tweetbot integrates with some other Twitter-like service, I will go there. Of course, this is exactly the scenario Twitter fears, but I with this increasing saber-rattling over cracking down on third-party clients I wonder if Twitter is going to cause the thing that they're trying to prevent.

If you use Tweetbot on another service and no one is around to hear it does it make a make a tweet?

But isn't twitter all about following other people? Don't they have to migrate to the new service first?

I personally never read my twitter stream - it’s too noisy and to much of a pain to cull.

I read it by proxy prismatic, and news.me. And I mainly use it to post - for those who do read twitter, to the widget on my blog, and to Facebook.

I suspect that a replacement twitter could handle the last 2 use cases fine - which are the main point for me.

Could be.

Could also be related to Mountain Lion having Twitter integration all over the place. Seems like that would render all the hours of dev time to create this program pointless unless they can release early and get some market share before ML.

I'm not sure the two conflict. Twitter integration doesn't offer any kind of twitter browsing experience, only posting from other apps. I use the iOS integration for some posting, but consume and post most of my stuff through Tweetbot on iPad and iPhone.

You might be right. Tweetbot for iPhone was launched under similar circumstances - not too long after the first anti-developer statement from Twitter.

Direct download link :-) http://c401222.r22.cf1.rackcdn.com/Tweetbot.zip

Thanks, site isn't loading.

If you're looking for an alternative OS X client, I suggest YoruFukurou. Lots of options, filters, multiple accounts, works on 10.6 and feels great.

+1 Dev pumps out updates with new features regularly too. Plus the icon is awesome.

Oh, and I almost forgot, it supports real time streaming too...

Does it do multiple columns, too? With TweetDeck I tend to have lots of columns - all tweets, only best friends, dms, facebook and a running search. Would like to get rid of TweetDeck because it is the only Air application I still have.

Doesn't do columns, but does do multiple tabs. I was reluctant to switch to tabs from columns too, but it's my preferred Mac client now.

Also supports a "mini" tweet view which makes it work more like an email client. http://yfrog.com/oerabxhp

I am beginning to see some advantages. Still struggling with search (is there no "or" operator?), but I'll try it out for a while.

Have you tried uppercase 'OR'? I found that worked.

It works in the normal search, but I want an extra tab that shows the results of a fixed search. Couldn't get that to work yet.

TweetDeck is now a Chrome-hosted app. I haven't missed any feature changes between it and the old AIR app.

Interesting, never heard about that. So I suppose I can install it from the Chrome app store and remove the air version?

You can also get TweetDeck via the Mac App Store. Not as full featured as the old AIR one though

YoruFukurou is great and I've been using it for more than a year but I already use Tweetbot for iOS on my iPhone and iPad so switching to Tweetbot for Mac makes perfect sense, especially if you're like me and obsess over synchronization and UI consistency.

It's okay, I guess. It's a lot less smooth when scrolling and animating than Twitter for Mac is, and this trend of Mac apps not looking like Mac apps is really tiring.

I love the alpha level OAuth sequence of kicking you to the browser and then re-launching the app through the application url. :D Digging app a lot so far tho

Osfoora for Mac and other desktop twitter clients do this too. I'm fairly certain it's a requirement imposed by Twitter.

I had given up on the (practically abandoned) official Twitter for Mac and switched to Osfoora a few months ago. It's been great but I have some minor issues with it (Space pages down instead of up, lack of keyboard shortcuts for interacting with individual tweets).

I've found Tweetbot to be rather stable for an alpha release, and I think that Tapbot's strategy in releasing this early is to get people to fall in love with the app ASAP so that everyone will raise hell if Twitter takes action against third-party clients.

Another keyboard shortcut I miss is j/k for navigating up and down

This is absolutely worth getting for mac. I'm getting far fewer crashes than the official twitter client, a much nicer look, smoother interactions, and more information faster.

The killer feature for me is the ability to see the conversation around and replies to one tweet - this is extremely useful if you see one tweet between two people you follow but want to know the context around it, or if you want to see how other people have replied to a particular tweet.

You really get multiple crashes in a day with the official twitter client???

I (note: I'm not the gp) definitely do. Any time I have an unread notification, if I open up the official Twitter app and try to switch to that tab/page, it'll crash. It'll do so maybe 3 or 4 times in a row, before letting me see that page and mark that tweet as read.

It's pretty ridiculous since this has been happening for months on end now, and it didn't use to happen with the initial release. Twitter's OS X dev department just plain sucks - which is especially trying given that ML integrates Twitter into the OS. They need to step their game up ASAP - and definitely allow 3rd party devs and apps into the twitter ecosystem, because theirs just are simply not up to scratch.

Multiple per week for me. Often under such taxing conditions as 'posting a tweet' or 'clicking an image.' I really drive these apps too hard ;)

not to suggest the official twitter client is actually good, but you've been able to see the thread for quite a while now. Just double-click on one of the posts in the thread. It's not perfect, but it works most of the time.

Only in one direction, though, into the past. Tweetbot allows you to see in both directions by selecting a tweet in the middle of a conversation.

I'm particularly excited for iCloud syncing when it comes out on the app store. It's really nice to have my last read tweet synced across my iPhone, iPad, and soon to be Mac.

FWIW there's an entry in the prefs regarding syncing, which allows one to use Tweet Marker. Didn't know about that service before.

I have to agree. The Tweetbot alpha is more enjoyable than Twitter's stalled adaptation of Tweetie.

The lack of notification (my dock is permanently hidden and the app doesn't have a menubar icon) is such a deal breaker for me.

Then skip the alpha and wait for notification center

Retina support is good. But why does it force the discrete graphic card? Official Twitter app does it as well for some reason.

I think anything that uses Core Animation will force the discrete graphics card on.

I don't have a mac, can anyone share some screenshots? I can't find any on their site.

This article has a bunch of screen-shots. http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/11/quick-review-tweetbot-for-mac-...

Thanks

I was using official Twitter clients on my iPad and Mac. I heard that Tweetbot was slightly handy and useful on iPhone but I believe Twitter for iPad is pretty neat. So should I get this on Mac?

You should try it for yourself. The public alpha is free for everyone.

I love tweetbot for ios and it seems to be the same, minus touch-based actions for os x. Is there a new rule with stylized mac apps ignore the double tap to minimize the window action?

By "double tap" did you mean double clicking on the title bar? Maybe I'm not looking hard enough but I believe that feature is gone in Mountain Lion (the option is no longer there in General prefs).

Really? I've grown used to that. Why would that be removed?

No, they just moved it to the Dock preference pane.

Ah, make sense. Thanks for clearing it up!

Anyone getting stuck at the "Sign in with Twitter" dialog?

OS X 10.7 or later :/

Then you're really not going to like the fact that the release version will be 10.8 only.

Any reason you haven't updated?

because snow leopard did things better than lion (much lighter footprint, for one thing).

Well, not bloating your system with a bunch of new and updated programs is certainly a great way to keep your system footprint light.

In reality, Apple seems to be ok with releasing new software once it runs fast enough on current hardware. So it might not run that great on old hardware. That's how progress is made but means it might not make much sense to upgrade. My iPhone 4 is definitely pokier on iOS 5 than it was on iOS 4.

Lion doesn't have Rosetta is one decent reason.

For me, my Macbook 1,1 can't install 10.7. :(

I believe it's written with TWUI, the same as Twitter's official Mac client. I know that highlight behavior, custom drawn scroller, and scroll inertia in the scroll view from anywhere. Probably the first big user out side of Twitter to use it publicly. I bet it made porting the iOS code over easy with all the Core Animation the iOS version uses.

Edit: Nope. I was wrong. I see the nib files. It's AppKit. They just use a hell of a lot of Core Animation.

I'm not so sure it is. The scroll inertia is completely different from Twitter for Mac, and which custom scroll bars?

I've been waiting this for a long time, I'm really happy they shipped it.

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