Hands-On: TweetDeck Wants To Be Your Pro Twitter Client Again

I twitter a lot . Even more than we tweet, I'm on Twitter " reading, engaging, linking, tracking news, unresolved out. In every respect, I'm a pro Twitter user. And until today, we usually really frequency used the best-known "pro" desktop Twitter client, TweetDeck.

But right away TweetDeck (which is owned by Twitter) has at last

Here's how a Twitter orator thinks about the attribute between TweetDeck and the mainstream Twitter client:

TweetDeck provides an experience for people who wish a more modernized experience, quite a more modernized expenditure experience. From brands to newsrooms, TweetDeck's multi-column plan offers a rapid and easy way for people to keep up with all they're meddlesome in. This includes their timeline, of course, and moreover tracking hashtags, keywords and saved searches.

Now, you should know that we am as specific about my Twitter customers as we used to be about my preferred pens and notebooks " that is to say, unusually so. Besides an progressing chronicle of TweetDeck on my desktop at work, I'm a air blower of two apps. On my phone, we to one side use TweetBot. On my MacBook Pro, we to one side use (and exuberantly evangelize) a little-known but surely extraordinary local Cocoa app called YoruFukurou .

(And right away you know that I'm moreover a Mac and iPhone user. we dismissed up TweetDeck in Windows 8 and couldn't find any differences, but we didn't perform an downright analogous examination on any OS.)

In chronicle 1.3, TweetDeck has in essence held up with YoruFukurou and TweetBot in underline parity. It has YoruFukurou's aptitude to simply succeed semi-custom columns and manifestation media inline. It has TweetBot's local administration of Twitter lists, that is flattering sufficient necessary to handling multi-part columns. YoruFukurou doesn't even have that.

TweetDeck moreover has two new firehose options for columns, here described by Twitter/TweetDeck's Richard Barley :

Interactions "shows not usually all of your mentions, but moreover alerts when you have been followed, updated to a list, retweeted or favorited";

Activity "shows a real-time feed of all the follow, preferred and add-to-list activities achieved by the accounts that you follow."

Both streams tie in up good with Twitter's identical rebranding moves on its websites and other clients, whilst still being kind to TweetDeck's own style. If Twitter's group had attempted replacing Mentions with Interactions in TweetDeck (as they kind of did with the Twitter iPhone app), they might have had a user uproar. But as an updated choice for data junkies, it's perfect.

TweetDeck moreover keeps the features that have done it dear by power users for years: scheduled tweets, scheduled accounts, syncing between customers opposite machines, etc. As far as we can tell, chronicle 1.3 is a purely addition release; nobody is going to be upset at a beloved-if-little-used-feature that's vanished.

Now, not all in the new TweetDeck is perfect. For the many part, the deficiencies, for me, advance down to 3 long-established beefs we have with TweetDeck: It still uses web tech rsther than than OS-native focus frameworks, it's not really customizable, and it offers a suboptimal experience on not as big screens - like, say, laptops.

Let's beginning with the bottom and work our way up. In TweetDeck 1.3, you still can't resize columns, possibly individually, all at once, or dynamically, similar to in TweetDeck before chronicle 1.0. You might say, "hmm, so what, you can't resize, what's the big deal?" But the incapacity to resize columns (or for TweetDeck to even cleverly establish what kind of shade it's on and size columns accordingly), leads to giddiness similar to what's in this screenshot:

This is with TweetDeck in fullscreen on my laptop at 1280 x 800 " a flattering renouned fortitude surroundings for 13″ laptops. See that ridiculous, column-sized void space to the right? There's obviously other mainstay just past it. we can't obtain it " unless we resize my window to overlie to both sides of the screen, that is, well, silly.

That's just one thing you can't customize. Besides mainstay widths, you can't change colors/themes; that tweets or updates give you Growl notifications; whether you use cite outlines or RT to do edited retweets (even even though TweetDeck has switched to the far-preferable "RT" option, it feels similar to it should be user-configurable); the refurbish modernise rate; or where presentation windows be present on screen.

You can customize whether you take presentation windows or sounds for any column, but you have to click on the rigging next to any one. Opening the "Preferences" menu piece on OS X doesn't obviously let you configure really many preferences at all.

This is often since TweetDeck isn't a Cocoa app. With chronicle 1.0, it at last ditched Adobe AIR - a sometimes-twitchy runtime that allows for easy cross-platform growth at the cost of anything imitative low OS formation - and is right away built in HTML5. But it still can't offer anything imitative low OS integration.

That means: no set of keys shortcuts or commands, no multitouch gestures, no contextual menus using a right- or secondary-click, and no actual menu and setup things at the tip of the screen. And this is why we admire YoruFukurou.

My tiny round of YoruFukurou partisans and converts on Twitter call any other "NightOwls" (which is what "YoruFukurou" means in Japanese). It's brilliant. It doesn't have TweetDeck's signature multiple-column view, but that obviously creates it simpler to use on a laptop. Because it's a local Cocoa app, it has a great set of set of keys shortcuts.

It's magnificently configurable - roughly as well sufficient so. You can outlay 20 mins perplexing to spike down the best shade of purple to use is to credentials in choosen tweets. And YoruFukurou doesn't just do inline media; it does inline interpretation . When you draw towards a print in to the twitter window, it uploads the print (according to your chosen print service) instead of pasting the photo's filename path. It includes a "mark all as read" command, keystroke and user-configurable gesture.

TweetDeck creates you examine off messages one at a time, even if you've already read them, just since it's refiltered your results. That's right: Twitter's pro customer still can't discuss it Twitter the service, "Yes, this user has right away read these messages."

Now, not every application, mainly a amicable media application, needs a skilled turn of user configurability. But not every app is expected for power users, either. TweetDeck is. Or it's ostensible to be.

TweetDeck is expected for users who are, similar to me, both unusually specific and desperately seeking is to many effective way to succeed a gigantic, always-flowing swell of information. And we need something more: not just consumption, but conversation, participation, command .

So next week, I'll still do what we always do: read tweets (and Facebook updates) with TweetDeck on my desktop, post tweets with YoruFukurou on my laptop, and keep stream on the go with Tweetbot on my iPhone. And my experience getting more information tweets with TweetDeck on that big shade is going to be a lot better. But it still won't be all it ought to be.

Update: I'd reached out to spokespeople at Twitter and TweetDeck to inquire them about the new app, but since the TweetDeck group is largely UK-based, we didn't obtain an answer back before the post was scheduled to run. Here are a couple of engaging things they said:

We wish to supply features for TweetDeck's core audience, that includes journalists, newsrooms, brands, politicians etc. We're all the time exploring ways to make it simpler for those folks to use TweetDeck as their middle app to uncover what's going on in the world and to rivet with content.

Framing TweetDeck as an app for breakthrough is both a good way to put it and a divulgence peek in to what Twitter is up to as it thinks about both its service and how its customers can best encouragement it.

I moreover asked the dev group what their preferred unsung features in TweetDeck were:

Some of our prime features:

global filter

ability to see someone else's home timeline

Ctrl + Enter to send a Tweet

adding a mainstay for any feed from any user

I'll unquestionably be adding Ctrl + Enter to my repertoire, even as we not-so-silently deplore that we can't configure it to be Cmd + Enter instead. Seriously; it's so close.