One of the major players on the iPhone twitter client market, EchoFon (previously TwitterFon), has brought its weight over to the Mac platform. EchoFon for Mac is a public beta, designed to be minimalistic, approachable, and pack in just the right amount of features.
The user interface is a bare minimum four tabs at the top with a tweet list. Nothing spectacular, but for those who want that minimalist look, EchoFon will fit in just well. EchoFon is very notification friendly. It not only spits out growl notifications for each new tweet, it also marks how many new tweets, mentions, or direct messages you’ve got. Click a profile name or “In reply to” and the drawer pops out giving you user details or a reply chain respectively. A special mention for the reply chain navigation, as it not only brings up the chain starting from the current selected tweet (like other clients do), but all other tweets from people you are following. Much like Gmail conversations does. So far EchoFon looks and feels just right. EchoFon is also super fast, with no lag and minimal memory usage.
Before I continue with my complaints, I understand that this is a beta and things will improve. EchoFon seems to bring in too little too late. Its multiple account support is nothing compared to Tweetie. Searches cannot be saved so you can’t track anything. The tweets list UI is also extremely plain looking, with no scope for customisation. There’s a lot of things missing, including clear ways of retweeting, going into conversation mode, and a menubar icon. But for what it’s worth, it’s a solid beta release, stable, and mostly feature rich.
The big selling point of EchoFon for Mac, is that it syncs with EchoFon for iPhone. If you read through your mentions on the Mac, they get marked read on the iPhone, and vice versa. I haven’t tried the push-sync feature, as I don’t use the client on my iPhone, but here’s how it works. Another feature I really like, although I’m not sure what real-world utility is, is word or phrase highlighting. If you don’t want to miss something, add it to the preferences and EchoFon will make sure you see any tweets that contain those words by highlighting them.
Again, this is a free public beta, with the full release and pricing released later. It’s a really powerful client in a dead simple user interface and I’d highly suggest you try it out.
