4 New and Free Mac Twitter Apps

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While some of the best Twitter (Twitter) apps, in terms of power, are still the Adobe Air (adobe AIR)-based Seesmic Desktop (Seesmic Desktop) and Tweetdeck (TweetDeck), there are also some great, free native OS X clients (and one that runs on Mozilla’s XUL platform) worth checking out. Read more to check out those 4 Twitter apps for Mac now!

Itsy (Free, Mac OS X 10.5 or higher)
Itsy is for the Twitter minimalist — someone who wants to have the ability to send a tweet, view @replies and maybe perform a search, but doesn’t want the app to take up tons of real-estate or attention. The app has a very small footprint, both in terms of memory and screen size, and offers up the basic Twitter features. Plus, it supports Growl notifications and keyboard shortcuts. If you want something simple and something that will stay out of your way, this just might be your app.


Twitt (Free)
Twitt is a Twitter app for the Mac user who appreciates a good user interface and likes the ability to customize or theme his apps. Like Kiwi, Twitt supports HTML+CSS themes that are easy to install and change around. The app has the basic Twitter features covered, but adds a few things that power users should like too.

For instance, if you like to share photos via Twitter, you can use the built-in image uploader to send stuff to TwitPic (Twitpic) or yFrog. It also supports multiple accounts, Growl, offline reading, the official Retweet button, plus you can set up notifications for certain content and create filters to prevent certain stuff from showing up in your timeline.

The only real feature that Twit lacks is Lists support, but as it stands, most native Mac apps don’t do that yet anyway.


Echofon for Mac (Free Beta Version, Mac OS X 10.5 or later)
Echofon (Echofon) for Mac is a desktop version of the popular iPhone app. The two apps share a lot of similarities, lots of features, and a clean, if not mindblowingly-awesome user interface. Echofon has a really nice browser drawer that can slide out of the side of the client, showing off conversation history or user information or user timelines, without obstructing your other screen. This is a great compromise between either having something always open in a browser, or the menu and column madness that some of the more powerful Twitter apps use.

If you use Echofon Pro for the iPhone, you can sync your unread tweets. And if you send an @reply or direct message to someone using Echofon for the iPhone, they can receive a push notification of your tweet instantly. Again, the only real feature that Echofon lacks is Lists support, but if that gets added, this will be a real competitor to the power-user apps. Update: Echofon for Mac just added list support, making it a very attractive option!


Yoono Desktop (Free)
Yoono Desktop is a desktop version of the popular Firefox add-on and it actually controls more than just Twitter. It also supports Facebook (Facebook), LinkedIn (LinkedIn), Flickr (Flickr), AIM (aim), Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger (MSN Messenger) and MySpace IM. The nice thing about Yoono (Yoono) is that you can update your status across networks and connect to all networks at once. It also supports real-time search across your different networks.

As a desktop app, Yoono includes most of the big features that came in the Firefox (Firefox) add-on. Unlike the other apps in this round-up, Yoono is not written using Cocoa — it’s based on Mozilla’s XUL-runner framework. That’s the same base that Firefox and Thunderbird use. I mention this because some of the interface features are going to differ — similar to what happens when you run Adobe Air apps. However, while XUL still tends to be poor with memory management in Mac OS X, it’s nowhere near as bad as Adobe Air. Users who want a powerful client that isn’t Air-based, this might be fore you.

Yoono can be run in a more compact space, but it really likes to take over as much of your screen real-estate as you can give it. Depending on what you like to monitor, that may or may not suit your needs. Still, for a power Twitter client that isn’t based on Adobe Air, Yoono is a great option. Mac users should also check out the Firefox add-on if you want a slightly more integrated approach.

source[mashable]