Over time I’ve tried quite a few Twitter clients on OS X, some good, some not so good. I’ve been mostly using Twitter’s own Twitter.app that evolved from the good ol’ Tweetie, and for the last few months a client called Osfoora.
What would I like to see in the ultimate client? Glad you asked:
- Preview images inline
- Streaming
- Native and clean OS X look & feel (real Cocoa app), including support for gestures
- Global shortcuts for composing a tweet and displaying the timeline
- Allow to follow / unfollow, see follow status
- Regexp based muting, timed muting
- Easy access to lists
- Display both real name and Twitter handle
Osfoora comes close, especially the latest update with streaming support made a big difference. Still, Osfora is missing advanced muting features (foursquare and the like) and it doesn’t display both real names and nicks, and it doesn’t support gestures (the official Twitter.app is nice in this sense). So close!
Then there’s the alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac. I can tolerate it being “the most android-looking app on iOS” on my phone and on the iPad mostly because the apps are always running in full screen, but it just doesn’t sit well in OS X.
Given the stance Twitter seems to have taken on 3rd party clients, I wonder if I ever get to see a client of my dreams.