Tweetie sports a healthy dose of visual flair without trying to get you drunk on whooshing around. Clicking between your friends' tweet list, mentions, and direct messages, for instance, will quickly slide the current list up or down to make way for the new one. Clicking the icon of a second account in the left sidebar will slide it up to the top of the window and reveal its own buttons for mentions and direct messages. Double-clicking a reply will employ a fancy fade-zoom, revealing a list of all the back-and-forth tweets by participants. For a functional UI finish, small blue badges appear next to the timeline, mentions, and direct message sections to inform you of new messages. They also appear below the icons for your other accounts, so you know whether it's worth switching over.

If mining the Twitter community's thoughts on current events, a product, or other trends is your game, searches can be separated into their own window for persistency's sake. However, Tweetie does not yet offer much in the way of the advanced search options at , though you can manually use operators like "from:" and hashtags.

Loren Brichter, the developer behind atebits, has not yet warmed up to the popular custom groups feature that other clients like TweetDeck employ. As to whether groups will arrive eventually in Tweetie, Brichter only says that "'Maybe' is the best answer I can give right now. I personally think that client-side grouping is not a robust solution." Instead, he recommends that users leverage Tweetie's support for multiple accounts, since that's supported by the service. Still, this is not exactly a great solution for users who want to filter the users they already follow into, say, one group for news organizations and another for notable users who tweet about a specific topic or industry without having to maintain more than one account.

When Tweetie is released to the public on Monday, Brichter will offer it in both a free, ad-supported version (featuring infrequent ads from ) and a paid version for US$14.95. I've been beta-testing Tweetie for the Mac for a couple weeks now, and it almost immediately became my default Twitter client. Tweetie is fast, offers a great set of features that let users tweet quickly and get back to what they're doing, and the visual flair is fun and refreshing.