Tweetbot for OS X : How to improve it

Posted by McGillFR on August 4, 2012 04:59 am 1

I'm not a developer, I'm not a designer. I'm french too (So, be nice on my english please)

Tweetbot is a really good Twitter client

Tweetbot For Mac is currently one of the best Twitter client for OS X. It's so much better than the official one, which is dead I think. Tweetbot, for iOS or OS X, is gorgeous, but more over, it's an innovative client. On iOS, Tweetbot is becoming mature. But on OS X, development is on the way and it is time to make innovation to make Tweetbot For Mac the best client for OS X : Powerful, and different.

The power of Tweetbot is it simplicity. After few minutes, the average user can use most of the function of the app. Sure, the client has a lot of functionnalities and tricks, but simplicity take precedence over it with one and single column. That's why, regardless of the innovations, this "view" must be keep by Tapbot. This is the power of every Twitter clients against the official website, and it mustn't change.

In the latest beta, Tapbot has the good idea to add the possibility to create a window with several column. The way to do it isn't really "user friendly", but Tweetbot is now a real alternative to TweetDeck, which is dead on the Mac (too). But, I had difficulties with TweetDeck because when you want to display a minimum of information, you have three or four column. It's ugly, it's crowded, and it's unreadable. The navigation by column in Twitter clients is not a really good idea I think. For now.

Mission Control is the easiest way to see your life on Twitter

So, I thought about a second column, at the right of the feed column. This column should be always on movement. It's the oposite of traditionnal column, which are congeal most of the time. I called it "Mission Control", and the goal of it is to gather all of our interaction on Twitter : Mentions, our tweets retweeted, and our direct messages. This all new column can display Trending Topics and saved searches too. And, of course, this Mission Control is completely customizable.

Before, you needed a decade of click, now, just few seconds to see every information on Twitter. As I said, Mission Control is completely customizable. The previous presentation is a personal choice. I chose to display Trending Topics, and my two last mentions. The last area is my tweet retweeded and my direct messages. If I received a direct message, they'll show, and vice-versa.

With customization, I can choose everything on Mission Control : display rubrics, number of display tweets, place, order... We can, like above, have my seven last mentions and an area with my direct messages and retweets. I also chose to put the "control bar", which still control the left column, on the low. It seems me more logic with a bigger window.

Before, we had three big and ugly columns, where 75% of the information were useless. Now, Mission Control let me see my life on Twitter in few seconds. It's just a suggestion box to Tapbot's developers, but I wanted to show that it's possible to "revolutionize" the Twitter client.

I wanted to know what you think about this concept ?

See more on my blog (in french)