This afternoon, a site called Razorianfly posted a very interesting tidbit of information along with a purported screenshot to back it up. According to the site, Tweetie 2.0 for Mac is launching tomorrow alongside the Mac App Store.
Update: Confirmed: Tweetie 2 (Twitter) for Mac Is Coming!
If true, this is big news for Mac users who have long feared that the beloved app had been left for dead since Twitter acquired Tweetie and its developer, Loren Brichter, back in April of last year. That acquisition included both the iPhone and Mac versions of the software. But while Tweetie for iPhone was relatively quickly turned into Twitter for iPhone, Tweetie for Mac has only seen minimal bug fixes. Meanwhile, Brichter was hard at work on Twitter for iPad.
So is it coming? Well, the normally chatty Twitter PR team seems oddly silent at the moment. Has the company in Cupertino told the startup to ignore all questions about the product? Perhaps.
But I’ve had several conversations with the company about the status of Tweetie for Mac over the past year. The gist is always more or less “it’s not dead, but it’s not actively being worked on.” The last actual statement we received from them was in October:
We aren’t actively planning Tweetie for Mac 2, but we maintain the app for current users. For example, over the summer we updated the client to use OAuth and improved MagicMouse support. We also made the app available for free.
At that time, Brichter was being coy on Twitter as to the future of the product. And while Twitter said they weren’t “actively planning” a release, the word from MacHeist director John Casasanta was that Brichter was in fact actively working on it — it was just coming along slowly. Casasanta was in a unique position to know about it because he had promised a pre-release build of Tweetie 2 for Mac for people who bought the MacHeist bundle last year. But that was before the Twitter deal went down.
So could Twitter have ramped up development of Tweetie for Mac over the past 2 months? It’s certainly possible. The last big project, New Twitter, was completed in September. And Apple announced the Mac App Store on October 20. Apple may have reached out to the company to see if they could launch the app alongside the new store — which again, will be tomorrow. We had heard that Apple previously approached Twitter about having a Safari extension ready to go for that launch as well.
As for the screenshot, the images of the various users are all Twitter employees. And the two icons attached to the account loaded on the app are both controlled by Brichter. The file size (2.0 MB) also seems to match up well with that of the current Tweetie for Mac. Of course, all of that could be faked by a person who knows what they’re doing.
But it’s also worth noting that Twitter does use that dark icon for test software. When it goes live, the icon becomes Twitter blue. So yes, this could be an internal shot.
Long story short, it’s still very much a “maybe” for tomorrow. But it’s an increasingly strong “maybe”.
Update: Confirmed: Tweetie 2 (Twitter) for Mac Is Coming!
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with...
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