The problem with the Twitter ecosystem right now is that all the other Twitter client developers have more or less given up.
Birdfeed was the second best Twitter client during the great iPhone Twitter client wars. This has since been acquired by Brizzly and has fallen into a niche irrelevant (to me) market.
Twitter (Tweetie) is now junk thanks to the new trends popup ("#dickbar") and shockingly the Twitter CEO seems to have missed - or, probably - be ignoring the blatant fact that the first 250,000 Tweetie users fell for that client because it was beautifully crafted. Tweetie was alongside Delicious Library and a few other pieces of software that was as close to art meets practically in software.
Now, Twitter Inc chooses to add features based on what their company directives are, or "for the greater good" of the community - which might be all well and good, but the vocal people who use Tweetie/Twitter now have nowhere to go (as everyone else has given up.)
The most offensive thing about this entire saga is that it is the "early adopter" users of Twitter - the people that were using Tweetie 1 and such, were the Twitter die hard fans - remember when Twitter would die during the Apple keynotes? and now Twitter Inc is happy to ignore them for their millions of Justin Beiber fans.
I completely disagree; if anything, I feel there's more relevant competition going on then there's been in a while. Certainly when Tweetie was on top, I feel like there was very little good competition, although I never checked out Birdfeed.
I'm currently using Echofon - it's not the prettiest, but it was the first native Mac client to support User Streams, does some really smart stuff with its conversation view, and actually syncs the last-read tweet between devices - something I've wanted for years now.
Twitteriffic 3 on iOS was my previous favorite, and I still love how simple and elegant it is. I think 4 on Mac shows promise, but needs more functionality before I switch to it.
I know several people who are using Oosfora, which I haven't looked at at all. I don't like it, but I know TweetDeck is still popular (especially amongst super-popular Twitter users).
The question is, are there enough people who want an alternative to the official apps for there to be a market? The answer to that is still up in the air, but I have a feeling the third-party client sales have been pretty good the past few days.
I agree whole-heartedly. (The below is, of course, my opinion only.)
For me, the writing was on the wall when Twitter for iPhone first came out; they took the relatively simple and easy-to-use search screen and combined a bunch of separate functions into one bizarre combo search box that felt unintuitive and annoying. I still used it for a while, but wound up switching to the delightfully intuitive (if a bit under-featured) Twitteriffic 3.
I kept hoping they'd turn it around, but for me, Twitter for Mac was the death-knell for Atebit's aesthetic; what used to be an elegant and beautiful, yet still right-at-home on the Mac experience turned into an ugly, user-hostile piece of software… just like Twitter for iPhone.
If there's one thing I'd single out about Twitter for Mac, it's the non-standard window implantation. The titlebar at the top is invisible and tiny, the plus button is more useless then a normal OS X app, you can't drag the window off-screen, and if your configured displays are changed and you suddenly have less vertical resolution there's no way to resize the window.[1]
I could keep bitching about things (no font size adjustment, bizarre animations that give no context, poor highlighting of selected tweet), but there's no real point - if you like it, you like it, if you don't, you don't. :-)
[1] This was all in version 1.0 - perhaps they've changed/fixed some of this, but I haven't felt like going back and finding out.
> they took the relatively simple and easy-to-use search screen and combined a bunch of separate functions into one bizarre combo search box that felt unintuitive and annoying.
I noticed that too. Felt like the first sign that Loren was no longer in charge of the design. Sad moment. I haven't upgrade to the newest version, but from other's comments, sounds like the UX has degraded further. And I'm also one of the folks who'd gladly throw a little money at Twitter periodically just for letting me keeping using the service, and keep using Tweetie as it was before it was assimilated. No ads. No crashes. Delightfully smooth and refreshing UX.
Unfortunately the 'Tweetie never crashed' bit is untrue. I had Tweetie download and cache a profile icon that was trash and it continually crashed until I deleted and reinstalled. I do agree that the app has gone downhill since the acquisition, but I don't think the code quality has anything to do with that.
I feel like Twitter is going to a lot of trouble to keep their 'never charge for it' promise, and that's a good thing, but they should seriously consider other options as well. For example, I'd pay for Tweetie for the iPhone and iPad - I'd pay a few bucks for it. I'd also consider paying a buck a month for push notifications, but they give that away for free too. Heck, I'd pay a few bucks to get rid of the dickbar if it came to that.
Twitter, your service is incredibly valuable to me, as is a good, solid, elegant client. Let me pay you for it and I will. Hell, I've paid Loren twice already, why not once more?
Birdfeed was the second best Twitter client during the great iPhone Twitter client wars. This has since been acquired by Brizzly and has fallen into a niche irrelevant (to me) market.
Twitter (Tweetie) is now junk thanks to the new trends popup ("#dickbar") and shockingly the Twitter CEO seems to have missed - or, probably - be ignoring the blatant fact that the first 250,000 Tweetie users fell for that client because it was beautifully crafted. Tweetie was alongside Delicious Library and a few other pieces of software that was as close to art meets practically in software.
Now, Twitter Inc chooses to add features based on what their company directives are, or "for the greater good" of the community - which might be all well and good, but the vocal people who use Tweetie/Twitter now have nowhere to go (as everyone else has given up.)
The most offensive thing about this entire saga is that it is the "early adopter" users of Twitter - the people that were using Tweetie 1 and such, were the Twitter die hard fans - remember when Twitter would die during the Apple keynotes? and now Twitter Inc is happy to ignore them for their millions of Justin Beiber fans.