Playing Pan's Flute to Twitter From my Mac

Two weeks ago, I was still searching for the "perfect" Twitter client for the Macintosh. In the meantime, I've been testing yet another client called Syrinx, and I am so impressed with it that it is now the only remaining Twitter client on my Mac's hard drive.

At first sight, Syrinx looks like a plain-vanilla OS X application: instead of reinventing the wheel and coming up with some fancy custom design, its developer has stuck to using standard Aqua windows, buttons, etc. The result is a clean and tidy user interface that -- also thanks to having taken some design cues from iChat for the main window -- feels familiar right from the start. Syrinx's beauty is not only skin-deep, however, as a lot of attention has been paid to details.

More room to (think and) type

As an example, the text entry field is not limited to 140 characters: when you reach that limit, the remaining-characters counter will be displayed in red, but you can still keep on typing. This sounds like a very minor thing, but, while using another Twitter client, I found it extremely annoying that you could not enter more than 140 characters, because having to first delete some text before you could add alternative words or phrases made editing that tweet-in-the-making very tedious and awkward.

Not so with Syrinx: you have ample room to edit without running up against any hard limitation. As a built-in safeguard, Syrinx will not truncate and then send out a tweet whose length exceeds the 140 character limit; instead, the complete text in the entry field is selected and you will hear a warning beep, so you'll know you have to shrink that tweet to fit first. Overall, a very user-friendly implementation.

Syrinx's clean and tidy main window.

Where was I?

Another example for the thought that went into this application is the way unread tweets are tracked via a bookmark: by bookmarking any one tweet that tweet is designated the last-read tweet in the list. All others below it are shown as read, all others above it as unread by using different color schemes, and, as in most other Twitter clients, you then step through your unread tweets by pressing the space bar.

If you want to move the bookmark to another tweet, select that tweet and press the space bar, and the selection is moved one tweet down the line, and that tweet is then marked as the new last-read tweet. Simple and effective.

Alternatively, you could click the bookmark button in the respective tweet, of course. Speaking of which, in Syrinx the buttons for global and tweet-related operations are cleanly separated. The former are located in the main window's toolbar and the latter appear as a row of five buttons -- bookmark, direct message, user profile, favorite, and reply -- in the selected tweet. What a difference from, say, Twitterific, which displays two buttons -- reply and user homepage -- and lists other tweet-related operations together with global actions in a long'ish contextual menu that appears in the selected tweet.

Give me pause!

In case you feel like unplugging from the stream of incoming tweets, because you need to concentrate on getting stuff done on your Mac, Syrinx can do this for you via its pause feature. When paused, the application will continue downloading tweets in the background, but you will only see them after hitting the resume button. This is not only faster than quitting and re-launching the application; it also ensures that you don't miss a single tweet (most clients download just a limited number of new tweets upon re-launch), and it preserves your last-read bookmark, which, unfortunately, is lost across launches of Syrinx.

Further features include customizable color schemes for the main window, support for Growl notifications, and automatically removing older read tweets from the list.

Apart from a minor, yet somewhat annoying bug when resizing the main window (the scroll bar will move to the top-most tweet in the list, instead of just staying where it is), Syrinx has been perfectly stable so far, without a single crash, so the only remaining true criticism -- or, rather: feature wish -- is that, like most of its competitors, you cannot find the original tweet for replies right inside Syrinx, as you can via the "in reply to…" link on the Twitter website. Maybe in a future release...

A UI like calm waters

With its tidy Aqua UI, well-thought-out main window layout and functionality, and a set of useful and even unusual features, Syrinx has easily become my favorite Twitter client after using it for just a few days. Right now, I consider it the best Mac Twitter client for anyone who, like me, values plain-vanilla Mac-likeness in the best sense of the word.

Syrinx is developed by MRR Software and available for download from the product page on their website, and the author welcomes donations.