I am really impressed with Tweetie, the multi-account Twitter client iPhone application. I find it bizarre that Loren Brichter (the developer) has created a true, multi-account Twitter client for the iPhone and there's still not a native application for the Mac with a comparable feature set.
I've used Twitterific on my Mac for the past 10 months, and I wasn't able to figure out how to use it with multiple Twitter accounts until today. And only after reading the on-line documentation did I fully understand it.
The Mac OS version of Twitterific has so much mindshare that only one developer I know of ships a competing Mac OS X-native Twitter client: TwitterPod from drikin. This app's unique feature, from what I've read, is a database for storing tweets offline. This is not a feature that matters to me.
When I look at the features of Tweetie compared to the Mac version of Twitterific I wonder, wouldn't Tweetie have an audience on the Mac if it were ported? I mean wouldn't every Mac user who currently uses solutions like Twhirl because of its more robust support for multiple Twitter accounts consider paying a multiple of the $2.99 price that Tweetie is currently charging in the App Store?
How many other iPhone apps are in that position?
©2009, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (707) 827-7000 / (800) 998-9938 All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. |
About O'Reilly
Academic Solutions Authors Contacts Customer Service Jobs Newsletters O'Reilly Labs Press Room Privacy Policy RSS Feeds Terms of Service User Groups Writing for O'Reilly |
Content Archive Business Technology Computer Technology Microsoft Mobile Network Operating System Digital Photography Programming Software Web Web Design |
More O'Reilly Sites
O'Reilly Radar Ignite Tools of Change for Publishing Digital Media Inside iPhone O'Reilly FYI makezine.com craftzine.com hackszine.com perl.com xml.com Partner Sites InsideRIA java.net O'Reilly Insights on Forbes.com |
It's not an anomaly, lots of iPhone apps that wrap around web apps would be great in Mac OS. Facebook for example!
This is a great observation. I bounce between Twitter clients on the Mac on a weekly basis in an attempt to overcome each app's shortcomings. If something with the feature-set of Tweetie were ported to the desktop (with a few other features like play/pause and a way to mark what you've last seen) I would gladly drop some $$ for that.
I've been nagging Loren to do an osx version. I'm sure your article is going to help. :-)
I recently switched to tweetdeck from twhirl. Tweetdeck takes a little getting used to, but is pretty nice.
Speaking as a developer, I'm not releasing a MacOS version because I don't really want customers. Customers cost too much to service.
What I want is lots of users, and someone who will give me revenue for those users. Someone who will handle the sales transactions for me so that all I need to do is count the money as it rolls in.
Oh, and someone who prevents or at least discourages piracy without me having to think about it.
If Apple launched an App Store for MacOS tomorrow, I'd port our applications to MacOS immediately - and so would a lot of other people.