OS X desktop Twitter clients: Twitterrific and beyond!

I’ve had a Twitter account at the beginning of 2007 but it took me a while to really start using it. For one thing, I admit that I failed to see its potential then. Of course, it didn’t help that I didn’t know anyone with a Twitter account, thus not helping building interest… Any social application has to reach a critical mass, via positive feedback, where each new subscriber makes the whole network more valuable. I eventually got around to use it more intensively, as I started discovering usefulness to it and building a network. I do think though that the biggest impetus for me to use Twitter more was installing Twitteriffic on my computer.

You cannot underestimate the importance of a good interface to a service. When I started using Twitter, the only interface I knew of was the web version, which was failing quite a bit (state represented by the now infamous fail whale). Installing and subsequently using Twitterrific really helped me get into Twitter. I present here a short review of Twitterrific, what I like about it and what I look for in a Twitter desktop client.

Main window

Twitterrific is an application which only interface element is, when inactive, a menu bar icon (), which allows to toggle visibility of the main application window and changes color when unread tweets are available. The application doesn’t even have a dock icon, which means that it won’t show up when you -tab between applications or doesn’t have a menu. Most, if not all, operations can be accessed via a keyboard shortcut. Of course, you can also interact with it via the mouse when the main window is shown, though as it doesn’t have menu bar, it takes some getting use to. A very useful feature is that it can react to a system-wide shortcut to display or hide the main window, which makes it easy to ready a new tweet or post something quickly.

The main window itself has a pretty simple layout though it can be a little alien at first as it is quite different from traditional OS X application windows. The timeline of received and sent tweets occupies most of the space. A simple control bar rests at the bottom, allowing you to access your Twitter home page, change Twitterrific settings (implemented as a modal sheet), refresh posts and post a new status. As you can see, it’s mostly targeted at reading as opposed to posting.

Posts are presented in reverse chronological order (most recent at the top), each displayed with its author’s avatar. Twitterrific remembers the last post you read and dim the ones you’ve seen already. Mentions are tinted so that you can distinguish them from regular posts. Same goes for direct messages. Note that there is no distinction made between replies and mentions, meaning that posts are tinted the same way regardless of whether they are direct replies or re-tweets. As long as your user name appears in it, a tweet will be tinted.

Interacting with a post

Selecting a tweet brings up three new icons, allowing further interaction. The first one is the gear menu, which provides lots of options, as shown on the screenshot to the left. A little surprising is the fact that this looks like a contextual menu, yet provides actions that are actually affecting the whole application. The second icon provides a quick way to reply to the selected tweet, while the third one sends you directly to the author’s web site, as defined in their profile.

Neat features

Twitterrific offers Growl support, the notification framework of choice on OS X. This goes very well with the overall application philosophy of staying out of your way, hidden until needed. You receive notifications when new tweets are available but you get informed in an non-intrusive way, allowing you to see them from the corner of your eye, while you keep doing whatever else you’re doing. To me, this was also a big plus to adopt Twitter, as it put me in control, kept in touch with the flux of things without having to check the details until I was ready to.

Last but not least, I find Twitterrific quite appealing to the eyes, despite the non-standard interface and it’s also very frugal resource-wise (both in terms of CPU time and RAM usage), which can be quite important when you have a bunch of applications running at the same time, all competing for your computer’s attention!

Limitations

To me, Twitterrific is terrific application for a Twitter beginner, and without which I probably wouldn’t have taken to Twitter as much as I have (or it might have taken me more time to do so). It’s also very well suited to what I would say is the majority of Twitter users (though it’s a wild guess on my part), i.e. people who mostly follow a limited number (think dozens, not hundreds) of people and post infrequently from a single account.

However, as I became more and more comfortable with Twitter, I found that Twitterrific, at least in its free instantiation, was missing some features that I grew quite fond of using my Twitter client of choice on the iPhone, Tweetie. I actually consider Tweetie for iPhone as the best client out there, all platforms considered, but that’s a story for some other time…

For one thing, Twitterrific (in its ad-supported version) doesn’t support multiple accounts, nor does it offer persistent search capability or ability to follow trends, all of which I became more and more dependent on to more efficiently use Twitter. I now commonly use 3 different accounts for different purposes and being able to use a single interface without jumping through hoops to post and read tweets from several accounts is a big plus.

Similarly, I rely on persistent search results to follow mentions of things that I am interested in (most often JBoss Portal), while I use trends an easy, real-time news engine (though one that’s obviously biased towards a wealthy, industrialized and rather frivolous society that can afford almost constant connectivity, but here also, this is a subject for a different time)… I also like/miss on the desktop the nearby functionality offered by most iPhone clients, which allow to filter tweets based on your location, which is an interesting way to see what’s going on locally and potentially find interesting new people to follow.

Moving forward

In essence, I have been searching for an OS X Twitter client that would replicate the functionnality offered by Tweetie on the iPhone. I don’t consider myself a Twitter power user but my usage pattern has moved beyond what Twitterrific comfortably handles. This is not a dig on Twitterrific. Like I said, it’s a terrific app that I would recommend in a heartbeat. I just outgrew the use for which it is optimized.

Requirements

What I want essentially from a (desktop) Twitter client is:

• multi-user account support
• ability to track trends
• ability to track search results
• Growl support
• streamlined interface (though what that means exactly is open to interpretation)
• ability to track where I stopped reading tweets
• native interface with low resource usage, i.e. not Air-based which I find quite the resource hog at this point
• free and opensource if possible (though I am not opposed to buying a client that I’d like, I bought Tweetie on the iPhone after all)

With these in mind, I’ve been / will be looking at several twitter clients to see which one sticks around. Probably more to come on this…