Twitter clients for the Mac are popping up all over, and we’re going to take a look at some of the interesting ones that are worth your time. Two apps that have just walked out of private beta are Canary and Bluebird. Both of these apps are in beta, so they do have some flaws. However, as long as the core functionality of the app is set, we’re good to go.

Bluebird

Bluebird is the latest creation from 13 Bold, the same guys that created Bowtie. It’s got all the features you would expect of a robust twitter client. Multiple accounts, favourites, cool looks. What makes Bluebird stand out above the others is its ability to be themed and it’s built in theme browser.

Bluebird utilizes the powerful WebKit engine, the same one that powers Safari and Dashboard. As a result, anything you could do on a Safari web page, you can do in a Bluebird theme. In fact, all you need to do to create a Bluebird theme is create a web page, a special Info.plist file, and put it all in a folder with the .bbtheme extension.

Bluebird hasn’t even been publicly available for a week yet, and it already has several amazing user built themes. Installing themes is as easy as double clicking the theme file, then selecting it in Bluebird’s preferences.

If you send and receive a lot of DMs, you will love Bluebird. DMs in Bluebird are threaded, much like an iChat conversation. Each person has their own “chat” so you can easily read and follow along, unlike other clients that have a SMS like way of viewing DMs. Bluebird’s sound alerts also allow you to set different alerts for DMs and @mentions, instead of for everything. Another small bonus of Bluebird is that it will show you how many Twitter API requests you have left, this can be nice to know when you are using several clients.

Since Bluebird is still in beta, this is the first public beta release, it has a few bugs. When you post a tweet from Bluebird, any tweets on your public timeline don’t get picked up if they were posted between the time you posted your tweet and the last time you refreshed your tweet timeline in Bluebird. This is because Bluebird sees posting a tweet as checking the timeline. Another bug is that Bluebird tends to eat RAM like its cake. I’ve been restarting it once a day because it will quickly eat up RAM. After leaving it on overnight, it was using about 450MB of RAM. Matt Patenaude knows of both of these problems, and has said they should be fixed in the next beta.

Canary

Canary is a little different from most of the other native desktop clients. It’s bigger. It’s almost like it was designed for a child. Big tweet boxes, big type box, fixed width, the entire UI is big. Being large isn’t exactly a bad thing, it makes for a pretty simple interface. Click the username button for a reply and the button to the left for several reply, follow, fav options. The small progress bar under the Tweet button will display a progress when it’s retrieving tweets, and when you are composing a tweet, it will fill based on character count, as you approach 140 characters it will turn yellow, then when you go over it will show “tweet x2.” Yes, it will continue your text over two tweets if it exceeds the 140 characters.

Features wise, Canary is no slouch. Canary has the ability to add custom filters to your timeline, for when you want to filter out all the tweets about Eminem’s new single, or maybe the barrage of #followfriday tweets for that matter. If you post numerous links on Twitter, you’ll be glad to know that Canary has eight different URL shortening services built in, and you can use your chosen service’s login credentials. This allows you to count your click stats using services like bit.ly or tr.im. You can also auto-shorten urls on pasting them (which can sometimes be annoying).

It’s got support for multiple logins, so you can manage different twitter accounts. It supports photo uploading to Twitpic, integrates with iTunes to update your status with the currently playing track (useless!), can use Growl for tweet notifications. It can also be used for managing your twitter account including following/unfollowing, blocking, marking favourites, and visiting user websites.

The Verdict

While I’ve been using both, I’ve somewhat fallen in love with Bluebird, despite it’s current flaws. Knowing the guys behind 13Bold, I have faith that they’ll fix the problems fairly soon, and add more features that users are requesting. That and the customization options of Bluebird is what keeps me using it. I found Canary to be somewhat of a waste of space because everything was so big, and the fact that it was fixed width. I have a large widescreen, and tend to use the widescreen to its potential, so when an app doesn’t let me change the width, it tends to turn me away. Still, its feature set is bound to attract a whole lot of followers.

Still not satisfied with these twitter clients? Don’t worry, there’s loads more we want to talk about. Some of them are still in private beta, while others are just about shaping up. Subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up with our updates.