Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Tweetbot 3 for Mac

Tapbots (MacRumors, MacStories, The Verge, 9to5Mac):

Tweetbot’s new optional expanded sidebar provides one-click access to all of your subsections like your lists, direct message conversations and saved searches.

Columns have been rebuilt from the ground up to be far more accessible and customizable. Easily add/remove columns, change the content of a column or reorder them.

Automatically playback videos and GIFs in your timeline with a quick mouseover. A click on an image or video opens it up in our lightning fast new media viewer.

Go easy on your eyes in low light situations with the new dark theme, one of the most highly requested features for Tweetbot. See how images and videos pop beautifully.

[…]

Topics automatically chain together multiple Tweets to easily create tweetstorms or live blog events.

[…]

Ever forget why you followed someone or wanted to jot notes about someone for future reference? Create notes on a user’s profile that only you can see.

$10 is a small price to pay to keep supporting development of a quality native Twitter client, but I see this update as a bit of a design regression. It continues the trend of lowering the information density by adding a row of buttons to each tweet. This consumes a lot of vertical space and fills it with distracting widgets that I will never use—because I use the keyboard shortcuts.

Annoyingly, it did not remember my accounts or preferences from Tweetbot 2. Do I have the Mac App Store to thank for requiring paid updates to have a different bundle identifier and thus a different sandbox container?

Previously: Twitter Abolishes Native Mac Client.

Update (2018-05-19): See also: The Sweet Setup.

Update (2018-06-02): Tapbots (via John Gruber):

Tweetbot for Mac 3.0.2 is out with the ability to hide the action buttons until you move your mouse over the Tweet. You can enable this in the settings.

Unlike Tweetbot 2, favorited tweets do not show the heart icon unless they are selected or moused over.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

>Annoyingly, it did not remember my accounts or preferences from Tweetbot 2. Do I have the Mac App Store to thank for requiring paid updates to have a different bundle identifier and thus a different sandbox container?

Apple granted a temporary exception for Hype 2 to read the preferences file of Hype 1 so I can do the prefs migration while sandboxed. This has been allowed with all updates through the latest version (v3.6.7). If they ever decide to reject my app because of it, I also now also write the preferences to a shared group container that all future version of Hype will be able to access. Maybe keychain access is a problem for them, though?

> It continues the trend of lowering the information density by adding a row of buttons to each tweet. This consumes a lot of vertical space and fills it with distracting widgets that I will never use—because I use the keyboard shortcuts.

100% agree. All I see is a sea of buttons all over the entire window. It's really really bad.

It's a shame Twitter isn't more like email. Using standards or at least a well documented, well supported, public API for client access is a very underrated feature. I don't enjoy Twitter's web view that much and it seems client support has been deprecated. Meaning, I do not think it is possible for clients to have parity with all Twitter functionality, correct ???? Oh well. So many silos, tech looks like a farm.

Leave a Comment