How to make Tweetie even sweeter

Tweetie for Mac by Atebits is a wonderful, wonderful Twitter client. It’s absolutely the best one I’ve ever used, bar none. It is the only good client for Mac, and perhaps the only good one at all. Notice that I just said ‘good’, not ‘great’. I’ve never seen a great client. Only mediocre ones and this one that’s pretty good. What I’m saying is that while it’s definitely the best client I’ve used, it could definitely use some improvements. Anyway, enough chit-chat — here are some features I want to see in the next version of Tweetie.

  • Better use of the sidebar:
    • Slightly widen the sidebar and push the breadcrumb navigation up into top of window handlebar
    • Ability to stick specific twitter users in your sidebar to just go see their tweets
    • Same as above, but for searches/hashtags.
      • Maybe: when adding a new search to the sidebar, pop up a window that shows some random Flickr images in a search for that term to use as a sidebar icon, with an option to put in an image of your choice instead if you so choose
    • Same as above, but for tweets - shows the discussions related to that tweet.
    • Hovering over one of the above things would show the username/search term/hashtag/tweet content itself floating to the left of the icon
    • Obviously, all of these things would be account-specific: you would see different ones depending on which account you have active at the moment. (Changeable in preferences for whiners)
    • To delete, hold down the mouse button on an unused part of the sidebar and icons that were added start wiggling like the iPhone springboard. Drag them around to move them, drag them out of the window to remove them, and click on your user icon/elsewhere in the window/press esc/enter/spacebar to have them stop wigglin’.
    • Dragging one out while not in delete mode makes it into a new window
  • Improve @-reply views:
    • Search forward to find future @-replies in a discussion view (If I click on a tweet that’s part of a discussion, and there’s another tweet in that discussion that has come in since that, show that tweet as well)
    • Branching for multiple-person discussions (double-click the first message in the discussion and see any replies to that no matter who they were by; click any message in a discussion and see any other branches in that discussion as well)
  • Improvements to the menu bar icon:
    • If you have received an @-reply or DM, fade the application icon/menu bar icon to a different color (top is blue if new tweets, but fade to purple or aquamarine at bottom if new @-reply/DM?)
    • Context menu when right-clicking for quitting, etc
  • Draggability:
    • Drag a person’s name or icon from the Tweetie window into a tweet box to add that person/tweet as an @-reply
    • Actually, drag anything anywhere.
      • Dragging into a non-tweetie window (IRC, etc) shows the url for that user or the text of that tweet (prepended with author’s handle)
      • Dragging a person into the sidebar makes a new sidebar icon just for them
      • Dragging a tweet into the sidebar creates a new sidebar icon for that discussion
  • Do more with tweets:
    • Preference to have pressing enter in new tweet box send the tweet instead of adding a newline
    • Ability to delete a tweet you sent
    • Ability to “undo” sending of new tweets for 5-10 seconds after originally sent (perhaps just a more noticeable version of deleting tweets for that 5-10 seconds)
    • Ability to un-favorite tweets
  • Some miscellaneous stuff:
    • Growl support!
    • Ability to change your Twitter site preferences within Tweetie
    • Viewing a user’s profile in Tweetie should use their user page’s colors (fade in and out smoothly/nicely; option in prefs to turn off)

This is just the stuff I’ve thought of, of course - no doubt some of you have your own ideas on how Tweetie could be made even better. Let me know what you think.