Based on sales, Tweetie has been the elite iPhone application for Twitter since the App Store launched. Sitting in the top 20 paid downloads for months on end Tweetie has been exposed to a huge number of people, no doubt a major factor in why the announcement and release of the desktop application created so much buzz amongst Twitter and Macintosh followers.
Atebits software released Tweetie for Mac last week, immediately storming Twitter, holding onto a ‘trend’ spot for over 24 hours. A Macworld interview was held soon after, a few insightful comments were located in the transcript.
I really don’t know. One of the fantastic things about Twitter clients is how easy it is for users to jump from one to another. Just type in a username and password and off you go.
One of the strongest quotes from the interview, John Gruber commented on the point adding there is so little friction to switch between apps, there’s nothing to import or export, and zero commitment. This is what makes a developers job difficult when building a Twitter application. It’s difficult, if not near impossible to tie down a user to your application which the exception of them having purchased it.
Lack of feature additions in the future? With zero commitment users you’ve got a problem on your hands. However, for the public this converts into excellent applications which are regularly improved.
They serve some of the most beautiful ads around. Many people mentioned that they registered Tweetie but then opted to keep the ads on anyway (there’s a checkbox in the Preferences).
This goes to show the user-base using Tweetie and the attitude consumers have toward elegant advertisements. It’s simply no longer fair to connect ads and a negative view on the appearance and how it detracts from a publication/website. The Deck, and now Fusion have taken that view to the cleaners, quite literally.
The sidebar design in Tweetie for Mac solves these problems in an extremely elegant and scalable way. It’s new and different, which is hard for some people to swallow, but somebody needs to push the envelope and try new things or we’re all going to rot in UI hell.
It would have been simple to use an existing UI trend for many parts of the application, in particular the sidebar. The large sidebar is a UI trend found in an array of applications, especially those from Apple. Take for example iTunes, Mail, iCal, and iPhoto. The Tweetie user interface is out of the box down to the finest details, the sidebar been one of the larger and riskier attributes.
What’s sleep? But seriously, I’m throwing my weight behind Tweetie for Mac and iPhone. I have a fantastic new foundation with which to build a true next generation Twitter client. People have just seen the tip of the iceberg.
Perfect example of a committed and enthusiastic developer. Always looking to improve upon its product not only for the user-base, but for personal satisfaction.