Saying goodbye to Tweetie

The choice of a Twitter client might seem like a trivial decision. In many ways it is since you can consume it via the website, and if you're running a smartphone you can get a mobile version of the site that works perfectly well. However, a lot of people run multiple accounts or want a little extra "omph" in their Twitter experience, and so there are many mobile and desktop apps available. A lot of people swear by TweetDeck, but I've found it to be a very greedy client in terms of screen space and how it runs on my machine.

For years I've used Tweetie, or Twitter for iPhone. When I first started using it I found it nice and clean, simple to use, and lightweight enough for my needs. A lot of other people felt the same way and it became one of the most popular clients even though it only ran on iPhones and Macs. It was so popular, in fact, that Twitter (as a corporate entity) bought it and rebranded it as Twitter for iPhone.

Today will probably be the last day that I will use it as my client on my desktop, laptop and iPhone. And this has nothing to do with it being a sell-out. A lot of this has to do with problems in the app that surfaced a long time ago, in many cases before the sale.

The app was continually cited as a high water point in design. And I agree with that, to a degree. The point where we diverge is that with each version of the product, a new set of decisions was made that flat out contradicted what the previous version had - The best example being moving settings from settings.app (something there was a great deal of passion regarding) into the app itself. Options would either change or completely disappear, for example the ability to define how you wanted your quoted tweets to appear.

I do realize, and agree, that a good analyst and developer should work to minimize the number of options available. (A smart person once told me that every time you use an option, you're admitting that you don't want to take the time to make a decision). At the same time you can't just remove options and say "I've decided this is best for you, and if you don't like it change it yourself" after having given them the choice.

Secondly, the technical performance of the application had degraded. For example, the curent version of Twitter for iPhone does not appear to recognize that you have read a DM, so each time you open the app you see a glow indicating you have unread direct messages which you have read a number of times before.

You can also see which of your tweets have been retweeted using Twitter's built in function, but unlike the web app you can't see who actually retweeted it and how many times. This feature appeared for about three days, but was inconsistent at best, often creating multiple instances of the same tweet.

The desktop app has become vestigial. Promised updates never appear, and most of the time thumbnail avatars never display, meaning that you can have an entire timeline of mostly blank icons. I've noticed that this tends to happen any time someone changes their avatar (I also recognize it might have something to do with people who use twibbons).

All these combined mean that I'm not getting a great experience. When I use an app and I'm more distracted by its annoyances and inconsistencies than I am by features it has, or if I find I have to go to more than one source to get a complete experience, then it's time to move on.

I'm pondering using EventBox for my desktop client, or maybe moving back to DestroyTwitter. I'll also be trying out a number of iPhone clients, possibly even writing about my experiences here.

How about you? What are your favorite clients? What do you like/not like about any clients that you have used?