Update: URL shortening appears to happen in the background, without you choosing which shortener to use, and the shortened URL length is reflected in the character count.
Original post:
It’s been waaay too long coming, but Twitter finally released version 2.0 of the Mac Twitter client formerly known as Tweetie. Finally we can see native twitter retweets (an implementation I still don’t like, but it’s a fact of life in Twitter now, so clients need to be on board with it) and a slicker, more modern interface.
Another welcome change: finally being able to hide the icon from the menu bar.
But although I’ve only used this for half an hour, I’ve already noticed some problems with the new version. First, the dark gray on black interface elements (timeline button, mentions button, search button, etc.) are almost impossible to make out on my crappy Dell VGA monitor that serves as my secondary monitor at work. Switching between “Translucent sidebar” and not makes no difference.
Now missing: the gear icon that housed various actions you can do when composing your post (like adding an image and shortening URLs). I figured out you can drag an image over and drop it into the message window (NOT my preferred method of doing it, since it involves having to leave the application and navigate through various windows to find the image). I haven’t yet figured out how to shorten URLs.
Turning on Growl notification seems to send tweet notifications to my desktop in a constant trickle, instead of the batches every ten minutes or so like I’m used to. The constant distraction might be too much to bear.
Lastly, there’s no space at the top of the windows for dragging the window around your screen. To do so now, you click on the left sidebar of the window (for the timeline window) and underneath the message composition space (in the new post window). Having two different places to do that, both of which are against what we, as Mac users, have been trained to do for years, is unintuitive and uncomfortable.
I’ll give it a few days to see if I get used to these changes, but as of now I’m inclined to go back to using Tweetie 1.2.8.