Tweetie: One week later. Almost.

One week (er, four days) ago myself and pretty much everyone else on the internet were all talking about the just released Tweetie for Mac. I’ve been using it for Twitter all week (aside from using TwitterFon on my iPhone), and I have to say . . . it’s pretty awesome. It’s not perfect, but I think creator Loren Brichter is more concerned with “the perfect balance between power and simplicity“.

That being said, there are a few adjustments that I’d love to see that I feel fall in line with that goal:

1. The mechanism for adding tweets seems like an afterthought – it’s a tiny button in the bottom left corner of the window. I agree with LessEverything’s Allan Branch that it would be better pegged to the top like it is on Twitter’s web interface. I’d be fine with it being minimized by default, but either way would be an upgrade for me.
2. I also agree with Jeffrey Zeldman that the default setting for Retweeting “(via @user)” (or reposting as Tweetie refers to it) is not as ideal as “RT” (in fairness Allan also had the same complaint). Using six characters when you could use two seems like a bad idea when every character counts. Allan also complains about the fact that it comes at the end of the post, and I concur. My preferred syntax goes comment, RT, @user, retweeted content. I think it might be nice, though probably not ideal from an interface perspective, if we could specify our preferred syntax.
3. I find it annoying that mentions that I have already viewed in my main timeline still show as unviewed in my main timeline. I also wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have to view duplicate tweets across multiple accounts to have them marked as viewed, but that is a tiny, niggling concern.
4. Lastly, more of an observation, the ads by Fusion are so attractive and well-targeted that I feel disincentivized to actually register Tweetie for Mac. Loren actually said, “Many people mentioned that they registered Tweetie but then opted to keep the ads on anyway”.  I don’t mind this a bit, and I think it makes me far more likely to pick up Tweetie for my iPhone in the near future.

Tweetie for Mac is great, and you’re a chump if you’re using anything else. I’m sure that Loren is completely inundated with many similar requests, and I look forward to every future update of this stellar app. For everything that I’d like to see improved there are several features that I just love, and that is a very promising start.