Twitter for Mac

» see itunes.apple.com/app/twitter/id409789998 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i never owned a mac during the twitter for mac years. it was an app for the apple-blogger and indie-developer slice of twitter, which was a different room than the one i was in. my twitter clients in that window were the web app on firefox and chrome from a windows desktop in ankara, plus tweetdeck for a few months when i tried to be a power user (which i was not).

the story starts before twitter owned it. loren brichter built tweetie for iphone in 2008 from atebits, his small one-man developer label. the iphone tweetie shipped the pull-to-refresh gesture that every social app on every platform eventually copied. tweetie won the apple design award in 2009. brichter shipped a mac version that same year, tweetie 2 for mac, a small native cocoa client that felt more like a desktop email program than a chat app.

twitter acquired atebits on april 9 2010. the iphone client was rebranded twitter for iphone on may 19 2010, the mac client became twitter for mac later in the year. then both forks split, the iphone version kept getting team-sized investment while the mac client got one more update on june 1 2011 and then went quiet for seven years.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

brichter's mac client had a real design sensibility. the column layout could show a single timeline or a stacked set of saved searches and lists. the unread count appeared in the dock icon. keyboard shortcuts for navigating the timeline felt closer to twin column email clients than to the web. for a year or two it was the recommended client for any mac user on twitter, the way tweetbot would later become for the iphone power user crowd.

the neglect set in around 2012. the rest of twitter was iterating fast on the web and iphone, the mac client was running on a single developer's part-time attention. apis broke and the app got patches but not features. by 2015 the twitter for mac app could not display polls, could not show inline videos correctly. by 2017 the cards rendered as broken urls.

~ the day it died ~

the announcement came on february 16 2018 from the twitter support account. twitter for mac would be pulled from the app store immediately and stop working in thirty days, around march 18 2018. the official replacement was twitter on the web inside safari. the recommended alternative for people who wanted a desktop app was tweetbot or [[twitterrific]], both third-party clients that would themselves get killed by the january 2023 api massacre.

~ the inheritance ~

twitter quietly returned to the mac with a catalyst-ported version in october 2019, an ipad app recompiled for macos. that one languished too and was effectively abandoned after the elon takeover. the actual lasting inheritance from tweetie sits inside every iphone today, the pull-to-refresh gesture brichter shipped in 2008 became a standard control on every ios scroll view and every android app that copied the pattern, decoupled from the twitter brand entirely.

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