Twitter has taken the tech world by storm. Anyone and everyone who has an online presence has a twitter account. And this phenomenon is slowly creeping into the lives of non-techies and casual ‘facebookers’. The twitter web interface has gone through a lot of changes and is certainly a nice way to work with Twitter. However, as with all web UIs, you need to have your browser window open for it to work. For any serious twitterer, a dedicated twitter client is a must.
This will not be a shootout in the traditional sense, for each twitter client features a distinct UI and functionality that cannot be compared with another. I will just go through each of these clients and let you make your own decision on which one you choose to use. (Note: Due to privacy reasons, I have used stock screenshots where possible)
Twitterrific »
The Mac twitter journey always starts with the download of twitterrific, at least in my case it did. Twitterrific features a very minimalistic, attractive and efficient user interface. And even considering its lack of features, Twitterrific has a huge userbase. While using Twitterrific I didn’t feel like switching over to anything else as it feels like the perfect tool for twitterring. The window can be customised to stay on top of other windows, disappear and appear when there are new tweets, and make cute tweet-tweet noises when new tweets arrive.
The colour scheme is perfect and needs no customisation. The replies are marked orange while Direct Messages appear blue. Even the links are easy to distinguish and click on. Special controls appear on hovering so you can go directly to the twitter user’s page or homepage (link opens in your web browser), or send direct messages.
Twitterrific doesn’t feature any depth. You cannot drill down into a user’s profile, nor follow or unfollow people using the interface. The twitter web client is more than adept at doing that in my opinion. It also doesn’t feature any url shortening features nor does it integrate with twitpic. Twitterrific is meant for twitterring, and that’s what it excels at. The free version inserts an ad once every hour, while the paid version costs $15.
EventBox »
While twitterrific is awesome and I didn’t want to switch, we recently came across this new application, EventBox ($15). The beauty of EventBox is that not only does it offers all your social networks in one window, eliminating the need for anything else. And that is not to say it’s twitter section is deficient. The beta application is forever improving (just follow @eventbox for daily updates on the happenings), and already features url shortening, as well as separate sections for replies and DMs. Read all about EventBox in our review of this awesome app.
To me this provides a complete online social network experience, and I thought I’d stick with it. That’s when some of my followers recommended TweetDeck, a cross platform Adobe Air twitter client. A little hesitant at first, I decided to check it out for the purpose of this review.
TweetDeck »
Building atop of the Adobe Air platform, TweetDeck has a very flexible interface. It can be made to look as tiny as twitterrific, or expanded to include several other forms that really help you delve into the twitter world.
A few words about the Air platform. As with all crossplatform applications running on the Mac, this one feels a little out of place. For one, you cannot close the window and expect the app to run. The only solution is to hide or minimise the app, which isn’t so elegant when you are talking about a twitter client. There is also a lot of CPU used when operating the application. My 2Ghz Core Duo iMac registered a 45% CPU use while scrolling, and hovering around 30% while performing other functions. Compare that to the 5% that EventBox application takes up and you know what the performance benefits of a native Cocoa application are. Overall though the Air platform is usable and doesn’t show any slowdowns on my system.
Anyway, I’m not here to crib about Adobe Air, so let’s talk about TweetDeck. I really like the column interface, where each column is an independent display of specific tweets. You can display your tweet timeline, @replies, direct messages, favourites as well as have separate sections for tweet searches. For instance, while using TweetDeck with our official twitter account, I created a search for “Smoking Apples” and “Apple AND India”. The first search brought in any tweet that mentions Smoking Apples, which is a good way to track our traffic. The second one shows me tweets that mention Apple and India, so we can track local events.
As a tweet-tweet client, TweetDeck excels yet again. It features picture uploading to Twitpic, url shortening, direct messages and retweets. You can also look at the complete profile of any twitter user by locating the profile from one of your columns or searching for the twitter handle. From the resulting window you can follow or unfollow the user.
The UI, while pleasant to look at (rare for cross platform apps), doesn’t really do justice to tweets. I found it extremely hard to differentiate between each tweet. Moreover, the twitter names are placed far from the originating tweet and closer to the tweet below, giving the wrong impression. This has a lot to do with each tweet having the exact same height no matter whether it is a single word or the whole 140 characters.
TweetDeck presents itself as a complete twitter client which almost completely eliminates the need to access the web version. It even tells you the status of the twitter service and how many more API calls you are allowed! TweetDeck will serve as the client of choice for our official Smoking Apples tweet feed.
Twhirl »
Another one from the Adobe Air family is Twhirl. I’ll say it straight, I’m not going to like this application.
The obvious ‘Windows’ look really doesn’t look good on a Mac. The Close/Minimize buttons not only resemble those on Windows, but they are also placed on the right side instead of the left. The window shadow is also not the same as other mac apps. Even ignoring its Windows aspects, the UI is not at all pretty. The window colour and tweet styles are badly done. I realise that the window can be customised, but in my view the developer should present the best UI, colours, and settings at first launch.
That said, Twhirl does have a lot of features that a twitter client needs to have. You can switch between @replies, direct messages, favourites as well as conduct twitter searches from within the interface. Twhirl also features its own notification system (useful on Windows, but on the Mac we have Growl), picture uploading and url shortening.
You can also post your twitter status to some other services like Pownce and Jaiku. And, you can have multiple accounts open for Twitter and a bunch of other services I haven’t heard of.
For all purposes, Twhirl is a Windows client and should stay in that space. The functionality is present, but unless the UI is revamped a whole bit, I don’t think any Mac users would like to use this app. And for those of you who are, please let me know what it is about this app that you love so much.
At the end of the day
I’m using EventBox for my personal twitter account, and playing around with TweetDeck for the Smoking Apples twitter feed. EventBox is really improving, and speaking to the team I know that there’s a lot more features to come that will fill in some of the gaps like picture uploading and tweet searches.
That’s it for my twitter story. What’s your favourite twitter client?
Being able to pause some sources might cut down on the heroin/crack factor.
