Regular readers may remember me getting a little impatient about a certain Twitter client a while back, before becoming a little more optimistic about the very same subject a few months later.

Months of frustration - both at the limitations of Tweetie and at my inability to find a client of comparable quality - finally came to an end with the launch of the Mac App Store yesterday and, along with it, Twitter's new official desktop client for the platform.

In the comments of my Tweetie 2 for Mac is "not not happening" post, I joined the thread, positing that Twitter, Inc.'s preferred desktop client was, in fact, their website, and I still think I was right back then. Apply that same comment right now and, clearly, it's no longer the case.

Evan's carefully worded tweet, back in October, now seems to be even more carefully worded:

Was it a case of being guarded, knowing exactly what their plans were and that Twitter for Mac would be released along with the Mac App Store? Again, look at the language used - "Tweetie for Mac is not something we're actively investing in." Had Tweetie 2 already changed name, internally, to Twitter for Mac?

Or was Evan being genuine? Was Twitter's stance reversed by external influences - by which, I mean, did Apple ask Twitter to do this?

Those questions will probably go unanswered forever. One that's much easier to answer, right here, right now, is this one: What's the best OS X native client for Twitter?

In my opinion, it's Twitter for Mac. Good job, Loren!

The saying goes: "Nobody reads anymore."

I don't agree entirely, but some of us - myself included, on more than one occasion - have failed to read a piece properly, getting halfway through before jumping to an incorrect conclusion based on half a story; or have felt so inflamed by an opening paragraph that we don't get past it to read the remaining text.

I'd originally planned on penning this post as a lament and a whinge on the sad state of affairs that continue to surround the development of Tweetie 2 and the continuing lack of clarity from Loren Brichter but, since yesterday morning, a lot of people picked up on a tweet from Evan Williams, the ex-CEO of Twitter, on his #AskEv slot, and have taken that to mean that Twitter 2 has now been canned.

Originally, that's what I thought. But I read it again:

I seem to recall that Loren Brichter's company, atebits, was acquired purely for the Tweetie for iOS and that Tweetie for Mac wasn't something that would be actively developed - so Evan is just reiterating what he said all along. After all, Loren was hired into the mobile team, and that's his day job as far as Twitter, Inc. is concerned.

Whilst the question was asked a day before Ev's "we're not investing" tweet, Tom Hannibal's interaction with Loren - whilst characteristically uncertain - did suggest that Tweetie 2 for Mac may still see the light of day:

Beware the double negative - it caught a few people out, Tom himself included - which suggests that it's happening, though when it'll happen is another subject altogether. One thing, however, is for certain - Twitter, Inc. considers Twitter.com to be the official desktop client, and thus they won't invest into Tweetie for Mac, so if it is going to happen, it'll be happening in Loren's own time.

My opinion is that Tweetie 2 will arrive at some point, but I won't be holding my breath. I'm already considering dropping my moratorium on Adobe AIR apps and evaluating a few of the AIR-powered Twitter clients, since that's where the majority of them seem to be, but - for now - I'm going to continue looking for a native OS X client.

Send recommendations and wish me luck!

Last week, whilst searching around, for the umpteenth time, for an application or website that would help me search through my tweets, I came across a wonderful web application called Tweet Nest. 

Made by Andy Graulund (who has a lovely visual blog), it is a beautifully designed web application designed to work on your own LAMP stack. Following a very quick and easy-to-follow install. Tweet Nest grabs your tweets and your profile and stores them locally in a MySQL database and allows you to browse through them using a simple interface. 

Of course, you don't need to expose your archive to the web, as I have done, and can instead choose to run Tweet Nest locally on your own computer. This comes with its advantages and disadvantages, the most glaring being that you need to have your computer with you whenever you want to use your archive of tweets.

Sadly, because Twitter only exposes your last 3,200 tweets via the website and the API, you'll only be able to retrieve your most recent 3,200 tweets. At the time of writing, I've amassed over 4,500 since January 2007 when I signed up, which means that over 1,300 of my earlier ephemeral musings are, for the time being, unavailable to the general public. Twitter say they'll eventually give us access to these tweets.

For now you're safe, and despite the fact that this is probably no bad thing right now, I can think of at least two main reasons why you'd want to keep hold of your entire twitter history:

Twitter won't go offline tomorrow... right?

I'm sure many people thought exactly the same thing about ma.gnolia. The number of factors affecting an application's availability is probably as huge as the amount of faith each of us puts in the online services we use on a daily basis. 

While Twitter is unlikely to go out of business tomorrow, there's always a possibility that they'll be acquired by a bigger fish at some point in the future - a fish whose privacy policies and track records make it difficult for some of us to continue using the service.

Tweet Nest means that, in the unlikely event that my tweets disappear from their original source overnight, I'll at least have all of my tweets up to the last half hour. 

Cloudy, with a chance of missing tweet history

When Twitter Inc. acquired Summize, I believed that Twitter's search engine would become much more useful. Sadly, there's still no built-in way to search your tweets further back than 10 days in the past, so a huge draw for me would be an application that allows me to do just that - search through my older tweets.

On a number of occasions, I've used Remy Sharp's excellent Snap Bird service to attempt to look into my twittering past. Snap Bird is, essentially, a version of Tweet Nest that's built to run within your browser, powered by JavaScript. It's also open source, just like Tweet Nest, which means that if you wanted to tweak it, to use HTML5 local storage for instance, you'd be able to.

Sadly, because there's limited error handling built into the app - something you'd be able to fix, if you wanted to contribute to the project - it becomes frustrating when the Twitter JSON API craps out midway through a search. This happens to me at least once every time I use it, something which probably won't with Tweet Nest.

Fire and Forget

Finally, once set up, with the addition of adding a couple of cron jobs, I never need to worry about the application again - bar updates, of course. By adding two lines to my crontab, my tweets are fetched every half hour between 6am and 1am, and my user profile is updated once a day.

If you're not familiar with the syntax necessary to create a cron job, just follow these instructions once you've installed Tweet Nest:

• Open up a terminal window and, if your solution is hosted on a server, ssh into your server using your normal account.
• Type crontab -e and hit enter.

• Add the following lines to the text editor that apepars

  0,30 0-1,6-23 * * * php /tweetnestpath/maintenance/loadtweets.php > /dev/null 2>&1
0 0 * * * php /tweetnestpath/maintenance/loaduser.php > /dev/null 2>&1

  Note: Obviously, you'll want to replace /tweetnestpath/ with the actual path to your installation.)

• Save your changes (usually CTRL-O) and exit the editor (usually CTRL-X)

Your new crontab will now be installed, and you should find your new tweets added to your local database every half hour. This is what works for me, but you may find that your server won't allow you to run custom cron jobs. If in doubt, you could always ask a bunch of people who know what they're talking about.

Looking forward to looking backward

I've only been playing with Tweet Nest for a few days, so I'm still finding things out. Already, however, I can see that it's a well made piece of software and I'd recommend it to anyone who values their tweeting history.

If you're not quite ready to take the plunge yourself and would just like to take a look at how it works, head over to http://tweetnest.abitgone.co.uk.

I've been a big fan of Tweetie both on the Mac and on the iPhone, where it is now the official iPhone Twitter Client, for quite some time now. I paid for a license on the Mac, and I bought the premium version on the App Store for my phone.

Even at £1.79, I felt it was great value, and I'm sure many users agree with me. Now it's free, there's really no reason not to use it, especially so given that - since April 9th of this year - it's also the official client for the platform.

Sadly, that's probably why my satisfaction with the desktop version is beginning to wane.

Goodbye atebits, hello Twitter Inc.

Loren Brichter, the man behind atebits and Tweetie, is now part of Twitter's mobile team. Who can blame him? To all of those who dislike Loren for 'selling out': you'd have done exactly the same thing in his situation. That's the dream situation for any indie developer - to be snapped up.

Right now, his priorities have doubtless changed. We're told an iPad app is in the works, and despite many voices to the contrary, Loren insists that Tweetie 2.0 is coming for the Mac, even going so far as to say that he'll continue working on the app up to version 3.0.

However, I'm guessing that Twitter's management have made it quite clear that, as an employee, his top priorities are now Twitter for iPhone and iPad. Despite reports that Twitter employees love Tweetie for Mac, I imagine that the priorities for Tweetie for Mac are lower than his other projects.

Plenty of people believe that Tweetie has turned into vapourware and that, now he's part of Twitter Inc., it's increasingly unlikely that he'll release a newer version anytime soon.

For the record, I count myself among the optimists.

From optimism to frustration

The Twitter API continues to go from strength to strength. The retweet feature alone is one of my favourites. Some of the people I follow have a lot of interesting things to say - after all, why else would I follow them. Sadly, some of them suffer from bouts of retweetarrhea. Originally, this would mean a screenful of RT this and RT that - something that wasn't easily filtered.

These days, the official method of retweeting - which attributes the original content to the original author - is as simple as hitting the retweet button in supported clients, and seeing original tweets from their original authors in your timeline.

The only problem is that, right now, Tweetie's support of retweeting is limited to showing you the tweets in the old RT @user: fashion. Not great.

Lists is another great feature of Twitter - I can segregate a bunch of people who are not quite interesting enough to follow and put them into a list. All I need to then do is look at the list and view the tweets from those users. It's like TweetDeck's panes feature, but officially supported and very much a welcome addition.

As far as Tweetie's concerned though, lists don't exist. Neither does the ability to geo-tag your tweets. 

None of these features are easily accessible via the Tweetie desktop client, but for me, it's the absence of the correct implementation of Twitter's retweet API that I miss the most.

Still hopeful, but only just

Before Tweetie, I used Twitterrific from the IconFactory. I had a single Twitter account, and I kept up with a relatively small number of people - in the low tens. The application was simple to use, didn't get in the way, and did what I needed it to do. When I was on my Windows machine - back when I had a physical PC - I used to use TweetDeck, up until I noticed that whilst running it was taking up a sizeable chunk of my processing time.

I've been looking for a client to replace Tweetie for quite some time. The problem was exacerbated last week by various API changes and problems which resulted in both Tweetie and Twitterrific being unable to connect to the service or be of any real use:

To Tweetie's credit, even though there are many other clients out there, I haven't been able to get to grips with any of them. Despite it's flaws and lack of support for the newest features of the Twitter platform, I still consider it to be the best desktop client out there - but only just.

I understand Loren's choice to not give an indication of when Tweetie 2 is likely to arrive, but having some sort of dialogue with your users, letting them know what's being worked on, would be far better than leaving them in the dark.

Despite the fact that I find EchoFon just short of being a credible replacement, and Socialite being far too busy, if Tweetie 2 doesn't arrive soon, I can see myself learning to live with their differences and shortcomings and jumping ship to something new - especially if Twitter releases any more must-have features.