First impressions of the Nambu native Twitter client for Mac OS X

Posted on the April 17th, 2009 under Twitter by Al

Yesterday I learned of native Twitter client for Mac OS: Nambu. What caught my attention is the Mac app look and feel and it’s ability to have a multi-column view based on groups. As I explained in this post, groups is the main reason I like using Tweetdeck. Both Nambu and TweetDeck are still in beta but after a full day of testing Nambu (v1.1.10), Tweetdeck(v0.25b), which I’ve used exclusively for many months, is much more stable and further along in features. I briefly tested the Seesmic Desktop preview (i.e. pre-beta) but stopped using it within a few hours. It just was too raw for me.

Things I like about Nambu:

Mac app look and feel; it feels at home on a Mac.
Groups – I gotta have my groups which I use to ensure I don’t miss tweets from family and friends, monitor local happenings and news, and keep up with tech. The single column view of all the tweets from those you follow is fine if you only follow a handful or a dozen, or two, people. That’s not me.
The ease with which you can add people to groups, through either a list or a context menu brought up by clicking on their tweet.
Threaded responses – Nambu will show a reply to tweet immediately below it as part of that tweet.
Hopefully Nambu is using the Twitter message ID to link the messages and reply and not just grabbing the most recent reply as some other Twitter clients.
Nambu displays the source of a link, albeit only a partial, instead of the URL shortener link, allowing you to look before you click. If you hover over the link, it shows both the shortened and destination links. This could help avoid malicious websites like last week’s Twitter worms.

Nambu bugs uncovered so far in v1.1.10 (3029):

Some links in tweets are not active hyperlinks so you have to copy and paste them into the browser to get to the web page.
Hovering over the Twitter profile of someone in the Home (a.k.a. everyone feed) will sometimes bring up the profile details for someone else. It’s an intermittent bug, but once it confuses the profile it continues to do so for a while.

Things I’l like to see in Nambu:

The ability to manually resize the columns. Tweetdeck could use this feature as well. It seems so simple and obvious, at least to me, for an app that allows you to create multiple column.
A way to reorder the columns in the group view. If an easy method exists, I can’t figure it out. I’ve had to close the columns and reopen them in the order I want them to appear.
Twitter statistics – Tweetdeck will show you a Twitter health status, the number of API calls used and when the next reset will occur. This helps me know if Twitter is down, or if I’ve exceed my Twitter rate limit for the hour.
Deeper threading of replies. As mentioned above it appears that Nambu will only display one reply per message. I’d like to see the full thread of reply which would help bring context to many messages. It could be a settings option so it wouldn’t need to be forced on everyone. Even better would be the ability to expand and collapse the thread.
The ability to choose your preferred URL shortener. Nambu is hardcoded to use only tr.im.
The ability to sync your settings, especially groups, across multiple computers so I can have the same set up on my Macbook Pro and my iMac.
The ability to backup your group settings. I’d hate to spend a lot of time configuring my groups to loose them due to a app bug or system problem.
Stability – Nambu locked up once for me within the first few hours of use, which very rarely happens on Tweetdeck. It may have been an isolated incident since I just started using it yesterday, but a quick look at the @nambucom Twitter account it may be related to groups. Time will tell.
Twitpic preview – Tweetdeck recently added this feature in which clicking on a twitpic link will bring up a preview window showing the image, or part of the image if it’s a large one. You can then close the preview or click on the image to bring up the browser. It is so much more efficient than having to open a browser tab to view the image only to close it immediately afterwards.
Facebook intergration, especially being able to post updates to Facebook. It’s handy to be able to see other’s updates, but I mainly use Tweetdeck’s Facebook integration to post to Facebook.
Friendfeed integration – Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook all in one app would be the trifecta.