Tweeting from your Mac

Posted by macforbusiness on May 20, 2011 in Hints & Tips | 0 comments

Increasingly more and more businesses are recognizing the potential power of social networking. A quick look at Twitter and you can see numerous Tweets from businesses, organizations, charities, publications about their new products, services or opinions on the latest news. Twitter is such a marketing dream everyone wants in. But what is the best way to manage your Twitter feed and make new Tweets? In this blog we take a look at a selection of free alternatives to Tweeting using your web browser.

Twitter by Twitter Inc.

First off we take a look at the Twitter App for Mac produced by Twitter themselves. Do these guys know their service and the needs of its users well enough to produce the best app, or will it disappoint?

Initial impressions: This App looks good! The interface is very snazzy and visually appealing and supports multiple accounts without confusion.
Tweet feed, mentions, direct messages, lists, your own profile and search (along with what’s trending) are all here and there are beautiful transitions between each Tweet as you scroll down the list. The new Tweet icon also looks good, but disappointingly there’s no feature to shorten links. The settings can easily be altered to let you choose your preferred image service, font, etc.

4/5 – Beautiful visuals and interface, but lacks the shorten url feature that would make it perfect.

Tweetie by Atebits

Initial impressions: Similar to the Twitter produced app in look and features, but with a much clunkier build and less visually appealing.

Has much of the same features, but sometimes harder to get at (involving going through multiple options to get to. Also supports multi users. A nice feature this has though is it allows you to shorten urls from the Tweet window (as well as add images and video).

3/5 – some nice extra features on the Tweet window, but not as nice or user friendly as the Twitter app.

Tweetanium by Appcelerator Inc

Initial impressions: Everythings there! Bit confusing!

This App only allows you to have one account active at a time, which is a major downfall, but it also puts everything on your screen at once – in the same window! If you have a busy Twitter feed this could get very confusing. On the plus side the Tweet box is right there at the top and easy to find, but it doesn’t make up for the confusing nature of the rest of this App.

2/5 – Confusing!

HelTweetica by Felt Tip Inc

Initial Impressions: Easy to find features, slightly different layout, not sure on colour scheme.

Instead of having the menu options down the side as other Twitter Apps seem to have, this has them at the top. Everything seems easy to access, but I’m just not sure about the way it looks. Even though it’s just a white background, it just doesn’t look “right”. The Tweet window is very good, with lots of options and features including a new and old retweet function (so you can choose whether to have the retweet as metadata with the new function, or as a separate Tweet as with the old type.

3/5 – some nice features, but not very nice looking

YoruFukurou – by Akihiro Noguchi

Initial Impressions – I can’t pronounce the name, but I like the unread notifications in dock!

The most remarkable feature of this is that the icon in the dock displays how many unread Tweets, mentions and DM’s etc. you have. It also allows you to mark one as read or unread. It also allows you to view Twitter conversations between users so you can follow discussions. When you get a new Tweet a notification containing it also appears on your screen.

4/5 – some fantastic features, but not very visually appealing.

Our verdict:

It’s a tie between Twitter and YoruFukurou – Twitter looks great and works well, but YoruFukurou has some great little features, but it’s a pity it doesn’t look good too.

Next time: Twitter clients for iPad