Good news: the official Twitter app for Mac finally got some attention today for the first time in almost a year. It now supports direct messages without the 140-character limit. Bad news: that’s the only feature added in the update, rendering it so totally insignificant you’re probably considering donating a new coffee machine to the Twitter for Mac team.
If you’ve been holding out hope that a real Twitter for Mac update would come along someday, today is still not the day. Previously receiving not even so much as a bug fix since last October, Twitter for Mac is seriously behind on features all other Twitter clients have since implemented. The app still doesn’t support group messages, videos, animated GIFs, newly quoting tweets and more.
Seriously, the only thing Twitter decided to throw into Twitter for Mac after all this time is longer direct messages, which probably took very little time to implement. If you pause and listen closely, you can hear the sound of a single, half-hearted party horn going off in the distance.
Jason Snell wrote up a piece not long ago on Macworld about how he’s fed up with Twitter for Mac’s incompetence and I don’t think this is the update he was looking for.
If you, too, are fed up with Twitter for Mac, a solid alternative is TweetDeck. It’s not as pretty or streamlined, but it supports every major feature Twitter added over the past year. It’s free and can sit nicely on your dock, too.
Still, every so often Twitter for Mac shows signs of life and the latest update is a very small one. Hopefully soon Twitter will decide to take on the task of keeping the app up to speed with all of its latest offerings. Until then, at least you can privately rant to a friend in more than 140 characters.
