More Twitter stuff for Mac Tweeters

A cou­ple of days ago I was alerted to new Twit­ter client thing to help you with your twit­ter­ings  the big whoop about this is that it is exclu­sive for Mac users and designed to work like a nor­mal Mac appli­ca­tions. While I still have a lot of affec­tion for Tweet­Deck it does have some issues that I don’t like…mainly its’ resource vac­u­um­ing ten­den­cies and unwill­ing­ness to let go of mem­ory. The lat­est release addressed the mem­ory issue and seemed to have improved its’ abil­ity to play with other applications.

Any­way, this new Mac focused app is called Nambu and while it is in pub­lic beta ( which means it is still being tested) is promis­ing. The pri­mary thing I like is that it  lets me man­age more than one Twit­ter account with­out log­ging in and out. So here is the skinny on it from my cur­rent use.

Mul­ti­ple views

While Tweet Deck offers mul­ti­ple col­umn views using them has always semed clunky no the case with Nambu. A click of the Mac like inter­face but­ton will change to another view.  The views are:

Com­bined view
This is basi­cally a col­umn show­ing your stream. You can use this to keep it open stuck in a cor­ner of your screen and ready ffor you to check at a glance. This view shows you the feeds from all accounts you have and can be just a lit­tle distracting…

Out­line or side­bar view
This view looks alot like the finder view in that it shows two columns, the first of which is sim­i­lar to your folder Finder folder struc­ture which allows you to click on and open fold­ers. The out­line view lets you change between Men­tions (@replies) pri­vate (DMs) sent tweets favs etc. With­out open­ing up the shebang.

Multi-column view
Just as the name sugggests you can have as many columns open as you like and you can cre­ate your own by seg­ment­ing your fol­low­ers into busi­ness, fam­ily and friends. This view takes up the most screen real estate. This view would not be good for a 13″ Mac­book screen!!

Mul­ti­ple twit­ter accounts

As I men­tioned it lets you eas­ily move between mul­ti­ple twit­ter accounts. Since I man­age another Twit­terr account this fea­ture is worth its weight in gold for me. ..no more log­ging in and out!!

Multi ser­vice management

Cur­rently you can man­age your friend feed account and Ping.fm account along with identi.ca.. For artists hav­ing Ping.fm avail­able within one twit­terr client will save time by let­ting you set up and sched­ule tweets with­out going into your browser.

Screen updates using Growl

If you use the Fire­Fox face­book plug in you know how handy it is to have sta­tus updates appear on your screen with­out hav­ing to be in Face­book. Nambu offers a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence by show­ing fol­lower updates in a cor­ner of your screen…not sure I like this but it can be tog­gled on/off through the pref­er­ences panel.

Mac  OS X like interface

As I men­tioned ealier the inter­face is very much like a nor­mal Mac appli­ca­tion and responds sim­i­larly to some of the Mac mouse com­mands at least I’m used to using.  A right mouse click over tweets will open a con­tex­tual menu that lets you select from a list of choices includ­ing follow/unfollow, retweet, reply, groups, favorites etc.…very handy indeed.

The menu bar icons also reflect the Mac inter­face mak­ing it more intu­itive for us die hard Mac users. Finally, the dock icon reg­u­larly keeps track of the num­ber tweets in your stream.

Real-time updates

A fea­ture that is lack­ing on many Twit­ter client apps is real time updates, most up date peri­od­i­cally result­ing in a time lag. I have to say that while the real-time update is cool, the speed of updates and resul­tant shift in tweet posi­tions are just a lit­tle try­ing on these old dyslexic eyes. On the up side, it does force me to keep mov­ing thereby reduc­ing the time spent twittering.

Pho­tos

Another of the cool fea­tures Nambu has is the abil­ity to pull pho­tos from any­where on your com­puter and not just Twit­pic other web based apps. The time sav­ings here is obvi­ous since you don’t have to upload a photo to an online service.

Url short­en­ing

One of the things I like about Tweet­Deck is the built in URL short­en­ing just copy paste and click the “shorten” but­ton and your have a short­ened URL auto­mat­i­cally added to your tweet. Nambu elim­i­nated the extra paste step by insert­ing a link but­ton which auto­mat­i­cally short­ens any URL in the tweet. Also very nice is the abil­ity to see the base URL, just mouse over the clipped one and you’ll be shown a bub­ble (see below) that reveals all.

Com­ment threading

Nambu also offers a way to see the root URL when you mouse over a short­ened URl and a tooltip bub­ble shows up list­ing the entire URL.This fea­ture is really nice if you can’t remem­ber who you replied to and what it was about, when that per­son replies back you can now know what the @#!! they are talk­ing about!!

What I miss that tweet­deck has is the abil­ity to click on a user name and see their pro­file and list­ing of most recent tweets along with the option to follow/unfollow. Add this fea­ture to Nambu and I’d use it every­day!! Like­wise add multi account and ser­vice fea­ture to Tweet Deck and I wouldn’t hes­i­tate to jumpship.

Update &cor­rec­tion  from Nambu

Shortly after this post I received a com­ment from Nambu point­ing out that indeed one could access a user pro­file and after play­ing with it dis­cov­ered another way to quickly get the info. First to get it quickly just mouse over the pro­file photo and a text bub­ble pops up to sum­ma­rize the user’s pro­file (see below).

If you want more info just click on the photo and the fol­low­ing dia­log box opens so you can snoop around more.

Need I men­tion the value of as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the soft­ware car­ing enough to cor­rect me!! That in itself speaks volumes.

Remem­ber:

Since this appli­ca­tion is in Beta use it at your own risk, and expect bugs, & crashes. Nambu is mak­ing reg­u­lar improve­ments that promise to morph into a great Twit­ter client.