March 21st, 2009

Lounge – Twitter App for Mac and iPhone

A new Mac OS X Twitter app on the block, Lounge, is a multiple account Twitter app that allows you to do most things with ease, tweeting, replying, direct messages, favourites, retweet and even lets you learn more about a particular user by displaying a user’s profile, followers/following right in the app itself (very useful).

Lounge for Mac is currently in beta, you can download it free at the website. Lounge’s accompanying iPhone app is now at 1.0 and is currently available at the App Store.


Lounge’s User Interface


The user interface is straightforward with tweets on the right and functions on the left.

Features

Notice that all the frequently used functions are displayed on the left. You can also hide the sidebar by hitting a hot toggle key “Cmd+Opt+C”. Here’s an explanation of the various sidebar functions:

My 2 Cents: All the tweets by you
Favourites: Tweets that you marked as favourites
Friends: Your friends twitter stream
Replies: Your @replies
Vanity: All the tweets from the Twitterverse that mentions your user name
Everyone: Main timeline
Search: You can do a Twitter-wide search here with option to save result
Received: Private messages that you’ve received
Sent: Private messages you’ve sent
Followers: All your followers
Following: All tweeps that you follow


Reply Chains


One of the problem that most Twitter users face is that there is no obvious way to view what your friends are replying to when they send you an @reply, and vice versa. With Lounge, viewing reply chains is a breeze.


Tweeting Options

For every tweet, you can choose to retweet, link to tweet, copy tweet or tweet URL etc.

However there is no way for you to set the retweet format, eg. “RT @username” or “(via @username).

There’s is also no feature to let you conveniently shorten a URL. But keep in mind that Lounge’s Mac app is currently in it’s beta, if we’re lucky we might see these feature in future releases.


Check a User’s Profile

Checking a user’s profile is only a click away (click on the user’s avatar). There is no need to launch the user’s Twitter profile page as the information is shown in the app itself, which is a very neat feature.


Multiple Accounts

For people with multiple Twitter personalities this feature is a god-send as it streamlines all your account in one place. Switching an account is a click away. This is something I have been waiting for from Eventbox which is still lacking.


Growl

A growl notification is triggered each time Lounge checks for tweets. It’ll only show one latest tweet and tells you how many more new tweets were fetched.

You can only turn off growl notifications from Growl’s preference pane.


Preferences

This is all there is to the preference pane.

Set your hot key to activate Lounge window (very similar to Twitterrific and Eventbox) and an option to use your return key to send tweets.


Lounge iPhone App

The iPhone app is a a little half-baked when compared to popular Twitter iPhone apps like Tweetie and Twitterlator. There is no retweet or Twitpic functions, means that there is no easy way to retweet your friend’s tweet, or share a pic via Twitpic with your friends on your iPhone app. The current version is 1.0, hopefully the later versions will bring these major functions into the app.


User Interface


The look and feel is the same compared to the Mac app, which is a good move to tie both apps from different platforms together. You can do pretty much the same things that you can do with the desktop version.


Landscape Mode


One of the first I’ve seen, displaying tweets in landscape mode while letting you switch accounts with just one click.


Search


The search function lets you group a combination of different criterias and save it, much like using smart folders.

Ultimately, I’m not sure if you should buy this iPhone app now if you’re comparing features with Tweetie or Twittelator. But the perks about this app is that if you’re also using the Mac app, the next version of Lounge iPhone App (1.1) will let you synchronize various kinds of meta data so the transition from your Mac to your iPhone and back again will be seamless.

UPDATE (22 Mar 09):

Retweeting via the iPhone app is available but it wasn’t very obvious to me when I was using it – tap a tweet’s body in the tweets detail view and you’ll be presented with a number of options, retweet, link to tweet etc.




Mac Apps