Twitter’s the place where I make my social media home. I seldom visit Facebook or LinkedIn, even though I have profiles there. No, short, sharp message exchanges with a community of friends and acquaintance is the thing for me.
But how best to use Twitter on my Mac?
Yesterday rate limits struck and I tried using the web interface, because my Twitter clients just wouldn’t work. My conclusion: the web is definitely not any way to try to work with Twitter. It’s clunky, annoying, and just unfriendly.
I’ve tried a few Twitter clients on my Mac, but find that no one is quite right for me. My perfect Twitter client would amalgamate features from several.
YoruFukurou highlights relates tweets
YoruFukurou drawer shows information.
Right now I seem to have settled on YoruFukurou, after recently using Nambu that I switched to from Tweetie.
It first endeared itself to me when I used Command + and the text enlarged. Hooray! I’ve had problems with text size in Twitter since I bought this new MacBook Pro a couple of months ago.
Badges on the avatars show status, such as unread tweet, doesn’t follow me, retweet. Press the Spacebar to go from one unread tweet to the next.
Open the drawer with any tweet selected and there’s information about the person, and easy ways to DM them, and check Follow status.
I also like the APIs left information at the bottom of the window.
A favourite feature is the way it highlights related tweets so you can easily see what a reply was actually replying to, for example.
In fact, there’s a lot I like about YoruFukurou. But it doesn’t seem to handle multiple accounts, and it doesn’t actually hide read tweets.
Nambu
Mute a user in Nambu.
I switched to Nambu when I bought the new Mac. I was hoping it would have better sized text than Tweetie (it doesn’t), but I liked its flexibility with multiple accounts.
I’ve only ever translated one tweet, as it happens, but Nambu has a command for that right on each tweet.
The delight of Mute became apparent when some Twitterpals were tweeting every moment (it seemed) of a soccer match. All I need to know about any soccer match, if I need to know anything at all, is who won. Nambu allowed me to Mute the user and to select the duration.
I love the way Nambu greys out read tweets and gives you a button to hide them altogether.
And the ability to open a new window to write a tweet is a gem.
But the largest font is still too tiny.
Tweetie
Tweetie lets you preview where a shortened URL will take you.
Tweetie also allows you to write a tweet in a separate window.
One of its great features though is being able to preview where a shortened URL will take you.
It’s been a while now since I really used Tweetie, so I can’t easily recall what else I liked about it. As I look at it now it seems a little feature-poor.
Put them together
I’d like a Twitter client that:
- has properly resizeable text
- previews shortened URLs
- greys out and perhaps hides read tweets
- puts useful badges on avatars
- highlights related tweets
- handles multiple accounts
- lets you compose tweets in a separate window
- lets you mute a user for a customisable amount of time
For the time being I’m sticking with YoruFukurou — being able to enlarge the font size is a winning feature, and it just feels good.
What do you like in a Mac Twitter client? What’s your favourite?
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for this Miraz.
I’d like to get into twitter, but somehow it doesn’t work for me. My twitter application is always hidden on the website and so I’m always an hour or two late on the news. Or I find myself overwhelmed with tweets I’m not interested in.
I’d like the mute and an easy way to direct tweet or retweet.
thanks
deb
Thanks Deb. You should only see tweets from people you follow, so just don’t follow those who don’t interest you.
I find Mute handy to temporarily silence people – such as when they tweet excessively from an event I’m not interested in.
I vote for Nambu. It works well and has lots of good features that make it unnecessary to visit Twitter.com.
Also, weird to see my avatar in this blog post!
Nice round up, Miraz.
I have tried a bunch of Twitter clients and fail to see the appeal of most, especially those that take up screen real estate with columns and columns of filtered twitterage.
I use Nambu – despite having a little wariness due to numerous crashs in the past – for all the reasons you highlight. I also find the right-click options are pretty comprehensive, offering all I need for now and the Growl integration which is handy for those ‘buried client’ moments like the ones deb mentions.
Thanks Buzz. Nambu’s Control Click certainly does offer a load of options.
I seem to have happily settled with YoruFukurou in the meantime (just wish I could better remember its name and how to spell it).
One thing it offers is custom tabs. For example I have one tab that follows one particular user and have also selected to not see their tweets in the general timeline.
Miraz – I have already downloaded YF (so much easier to remember!) and had a quick look-see but it sounds like it is worth a longer look than I gave it. When the sunshine next gives way to the showers, I’ll have a better look.
I feel your pain on the search for the perfect Twitter client for Mac. That’s actually how I came across this post. I’m currently using Echofon which is pretty good, except for the single ad at the top of the screen. Aside from that, it’s compact and is filled with features. I’m not sure about the text size issue because the default size is good for me. The one thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t set it to display people’s full names on the timeline.
I wonder if you’ve tried my favorite client, Twit Menulet? I run this little program 24 hours a day and it keeps me up-to-date. Small footprint but very capable. http://twitmenulet.com
Much love,
EK
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