Mac Gems: Tweetbot for Mac is exactly what you'd expect

19.10.2012
To say I use begrudgingly isn't quite right. When I first joined the microblogging service in February 2007, I wasn't impressed and didn't stick around. I came back to the service in earnest a couple years later, and it's become a daily go-to place for me. I use it professionally and personally, and so do many of the folks I follow. It's full of quips and silliness, but also great information and insight. So it's fair to say that I've come to love Twitter, the service.

But I feel far less warmly towards Twitter, the company, which has started making life much more difficult for the third-party developers whose apps work with the service. That's a shame, because I've repeatedly been impressed by the innovation and design that characterize the best Twitter clients, and the company's actions put the development of such apps in jeopardy.

Of course, this is a review of the excellent new (), not a review of Twitter's business practices. But I bring up the latter here because one of the effects of Twitter's new developer restrictions--specifically, the finite limit on how many users a given Twitter client can support--is that developer Tapbots is . Specifically, Tweetbot for Mac will cost you $20, at a time when many similar apps can be found for $10 or less. Which means that for many readers, the question isn't just whether Tweetbot is good, but whether it's worth the price.

It's no secret that I love Tweetbot for and for . Before the app came to the Mac, I longed for it, mostly because Tweetbot for iOS shaped how I use Twitter. I love the tap-and-hold shortcuts, the easy navigation, and the tight integration with a slew of services for saving content, posting photos, and more.

The key question, of course, is how well Tweetbot's iOS-inspired actions and interface map to the Mac. The app mostly makes that leap in smart ways. A good example is that the tap-and-hold action in iOS becomes right-click (or Control+click) on the Mac: Right-click on a user's name or avatar to get options to mute, follow/unfollow, send a private message, manage list membership, or report for spam. Right-click on a tweet to copy a link to it, copy its text, email it, translate it, view it in Favstar, and more. Right-click on a link within a tweet to compose a post about the link, send it to the read-later service of your choice, open it in your default browser, and so on.