Is Twitter killing off Tweetie for Mac?
I’ve been a long time user of Tweetie, first for Mac, then later on the iPhone. A few weeks ago, when Twitter bought Atebits, the developer of Tweetie, there was much concern that this spelt the death knell of the Mac desktop version, especially as this was (and still is) languishing at version 1.2.6 while the iPhone app had moved to version 2 with a couple of updates on top of that.
Yesterday, Twitter rolled out their replacement for the Tweetie iPhone app, called, not surprising, Twitter for iPhone. I will probably update to that but there appear to be some issues with the way it does a retweet, so I haven’t done so yet. I was therefore surprised to see Echofon claiming that I had tweeted from “Twitter from iPhone” when I had done no such thing. I had actually been using Tweetie for Mac (on the desktop):
This, however, was not the fault of Echofon, as the web page was also lying:
A quick search on twitter showed that others were also noticing this. The problem is that both Tweetie for Mac and Tweetie for iPhone use basic authentication and are registered with the same token. (thanks to Matt Roberts) When Twitter changed the tag from “Tweetie” to “Twitter for iPhone”, it meant that both incarnations of Tweetie were being retagged, one of them wrongly.
The conclusion is that either Twitter has overlooked the consequence of changing the tag or more worryingly that they really don’t care about Tweetie for Mac and are happy to have Tweetie for Mac users advertising an iTunes link to the iPhone app.
Tweetie for Mac is however still available on atebits.com.
I’m, unfortunately, feeling they don’t care about Tweetie for Mac anymore…
I too fear that the Mac client will be left to die. Tweetie have not offered a desktop client for any other platform (yet) and in the absence of evidence to the contrary I’d be surprised (albeit delighted) if they were to honour the oft broken promises of Atebits that an update for the desktop client was coming.
I feel so angered by the handling of this and the delays in the update, especially as I paid for my desktop client licence) as well as Tweetie 1x and 2x.
And what have I been left with? An iPhone client that is free to all and a desktop client that has been ignored.
I fear you are both right. I was sure I’d seen some assurance from Loren Brichter about the continued development of Tweetie for Mac but cannot find it now.
OK, found it. The day after Twitter announced its acquisition of Tweetie, Atebits posted this on MacHeist forums:
Whether things changed after that I don’t know but my bet is that the iPad version will be much higher on Twitter’s list than the Mac version.
I’ve also found this, that seems to confirm that Twitter bought Tweetie for Mac and they intend to keep it updated, but not rename it.