I can’t believe it’s been just a year since I first found Eventbox. Right from November ‘08, till the day Tweetie for Mac launched, I was an ardent user of this ‘social networks in one window’ app. Then, like I mentioned, Tweetie for Mac showed up, and Eventbox’s twitter client just didn’t have enough features to justify using it. Moreover, it was a resource hog. I checked back on it from time to time, but the team just couldn’t get the memory leaks under control.
Then a few months ago, Realmac Software purchased Eventbox, and rebranded it “Socialite”. No one knew what was going to happen with the app, so we waited. Just yesterday, Socialite 1.0 was released, complete with its own home on the Realmac website.
The biggest change to note, as it advertised by the team itself, is the new icon, which is a beautiful rendering of a mojito glass. It’s debatable whether that’s the ideal icon for this app, especially the way it looks in the dock, but it’s pretty nonetheless. And the fact that this is the major visual change isn’t all that bad a thing—Eventbox was a pretty client to start with.
To those who came in late:
Socialite is a beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with the social networks and services that matter to you. From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.
Socialite as it stands now is definitely a much more stable app than Eventbox ever was. It’s okay on memory management, hovering around 200MB with all services active. It also hasn’t crashed once since I launched it yesterday.
While the general look has stayed the same, a lot of little things have been added. The biggest gainer is the twitter client, with multiple accounts, Lists support (I believe it’s the first Cocoa app to support Lists), Retweet support, along with the rest like Instapaper, following, blocking, etc. And with the HUD user interface, it could be just as slick as Tweetie.
Systemwide, the notification system has gotten a huge overhaul. You can customise exactly what notifications you want, for which service, and there’s even a silence mode. There’s also a neat photo uploader, which allows you to drop an image into the main window, and have it uploaded to either Ember, or one of the twitter photo uploading services. This way you get the URL to that image and you can do whatever you want with it.
They really need to tweak this view. I’m more interested in the images than the accompanying text.
One service missing from this lineup, is Reddit. I prefer Reddit to Digg, and liked having it right on my desktop instead of trying to browse the website. I hope they bring it back.
Using the global shortcut, you can bring up Quick Send to post messages to Twitter and Facebook.
All in all, Socialite is a good effort, bringing the client back to life both in terms of features, as well as much needed stability. I’ll be using it to keep track of RSS feeds, Flickr, and post updates to Facebook. My twitter client of choice however remains Tweetie. Socialite costs $20 for a license, but all Eventbox users get a free upgrade.
