Since Twitter is becoming more and more a part of my life, I’ve naturally explored some of the desktop client options (for Mac): TweetDeck, twhirl, and Twitterrific. Here are my thoughts. (Just the things I noticed, not a full-scale review, I should add.)
TweetDeck
The deck idea is cool, but I’m a minimalist, and even when you collapse the decks down to a single column, it’s still too big for me. I do really like the search feature, along with being able to group your followees, and of the three clients, TweetDeck was fastest on the updates. It’s an AIR app, by the way. There didn’t seem to be too much of a footprint other than in screen real estate, which helped. I like my Twitter apps slim and lean. The reply/d/r/f buttons didn’t really do it for me, though, and while the typography wasn’t bad, it still wasn’t great. Too much information.
twhirl
Also an AIR app. It’s smaller than TweetDeck and has support for multiple accounts, both of which are nice. But there were just way too many buttons. That killed it for me. Too much noise, too many options, not enough hierarchy to show me which ones are important and which aren’t. Bzzt. I didn’t really care for the typography at all — too messy.
Twitterrific
And we come to the final contender, which I’ve been using since I got serious with Twitter. Twitterrific is the smallest of the three (screen-wise) and the cleanest and simplest. Sure, you can’t do everything you can from the others (or from the website), but that’s okay. Twitter is small by nature (140 characters and all) and Twitterrific feels like it fits that mentality the best. It also has the best typography, in my opinion — clean and clear. I don’t really need to know when the tweet was or where it came from. I really just don’t care.
My three beefs with Twitterrific, however, are that (1) the “What are you doing?” entry box is so small that you can only see part of your tweet at a time, (2) updates sometimes take a little while to show up, and (3) you can only use one Twitter account at a time. You really need to be able to see your whole tweet at once, especially when you hit the 140-character limit and need to rewrite. And when you’ve got multiple Twitter accounts, it isn’t fun having to log out and log in again each time.
In spite of these three issues, Twitterrific is still my favorite, and I’m standing by it. (And hoping they’ll fix the problems. :)) I’ve got it on my iPhone as well. It’s small, simple, and fast (other than the updates), and it fits me like a glove. Vive la Twitterrific. ;)
Throw in your two cents