Tweetbot for Twitter 2.0
It’s even better, but still isn’t quite the perfect Twitter app
Even better for chatterboxes
£9.99 Developer Tapbots, tapbots.com
Requires OS X 10.10 or higher Tweetbot is a Twitter app worth paying for, and this release is another reason why Twitter’s official client remains absent from our Macs. For starters, when using Tweetbot you don’t have to suffer through Twitter’s incessant efforts to wedge advertising or other unwanted content into our timelines, but the ability to display multiple columns side-by-side and have more granular control over Twitter’s notifications also makes this a worthwhile investment.
iPhone parity
Version 2.0 now fits in nicely alongside Apple’s new OS X aesthetic, while finally catching up with other features introduced over the last year or so in the iPhone version. (There’s still no sign of the promised iPad update, which is starting to buckle under the weight of recent Twitter changes.) This version also plays nicely with the latest quoted tweet style, and is ready for longer Direct Messages once Twitter pulls the trigger.
Make no mistake: this is largely a cosmetic and interface update, but the fact it’s free for existing customers (and now cheaper for new buyers) mostly makes up for the absence of any hot new features. Avatars can now be displayed as circles or rounded squares with the option to display Twitter’s familiar blue ‘verified’ check mark, while the entire application has adopted a flatter appearance with support for sharper Retina displays.
The biggest caveat remains Tweetbot’s apparent indifference toward inline media content. Tweets with multiple photos are now supported, but there’s no way to display them all at once, requiring a cumbersome ‘click, view, close’ routine for each. There’s also still no way to watch inline videos
It fits in nicely alongside Apple’s new OS X aesthetic, while finally catching up with features introduced in the iPhone version
(including GIFs), which go to your default web browser instead. This would have been many users’ top priority in this update.
Another new feature that could use improvement is the grid of small icons that appears whenever a message is selected. These handy shortcuts for Reply, Retweet, Favorite, and more practically require a magnifying glass to see on our 27-inch Thunderbolt Display, although the Share button is a welcome improvement for copying or emailing tweets, as well as saving linked articles to ‘read later’ services.
Still, we haven’t seen a better Twitter client for the Mac and it will take a lot to persuade us to move over to something else. J.R. Bookwalter