Airmailr is a desktop app Twitter client for the Mac OS X dashboard.

Features:

• all Twitter operations supported
• search capability
• good customizations available
• uses OAuth login

The Good:

Airmailr is a good Twitter client for Mac OS X. It is presently in early beta release, so there are bound to be a few bugs here and there. We liked the UI, the look and the level of customization. We also liked the use of OAuth.

The Not-so-Good:

As we mentioned, Airmailr is in early beta release along with the requisite potential for bugs. Airmailr stacks up pretty well as a good Twitter client. One thing we noticed was that, although avatars are supported, their appearance felt a bit “pinched”.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ★★★

Tweetr is a desktop app that allows users to receive and send updates to their Twitter account as well as sending photos and files.

Features:

• works on either Mac or PC
• send and receive updates to Twitter (including @replies and DM)
• send photos and files (up to 10mb)

The Good:

Tweetr is a desktop app that does the basic Twitter functions well. It shows the time of messages and avatars. Perhaps the best feature of Tweetr is the ability to drag and drop files (by link) into the app and have them sent.

The Not-so-Good:

Tweetr can only manage one Twitter account at a time, and it does not have the ability to group or filter tweets. There are some other limitations: Tweetr doesn’t show the Twitter client from which messages are sent, there is no character countdown when typing an update and the url shortening is hit and miss.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ♦♦♦

NatsuLion is a simple (or simplistic) Twitter app for Mac OS X.

Features:

• Display timeline
• Post a message
• Create a favorite
• Replies including messages contain @ are emphasized
• Input support for “@<ID>”
• Growl Notifications (replies are notified with a higher priority and stickied by default)
• Manage unread tweets

The Good:

NatsuLion is a basic desktop app for using Twitter, and it accomplishes its limited goals quite well. Graphics are good and the Growl notifications are a nice feature. For those who are interested, NatsuLion’s website offers a link to its source code. Of note, there is a version of NatsuLion for the iPhone®, available at the App Store for free (our comments for the desktop version apply to the iPhone® version too).

The Not-so-Good:

As we mentioned, NatsuLion does its job well, but its job is rather limited in scope. Also, the supporting info on the website appears to be in Japanglish (can’t really blame them, these guys are from Japan after all), and that can be either very amusing or very frustrating, depending on the time of day.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ♦♦

EventBox is an application for Mac OS X that seamlessly integrates many social websites, including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and RSS.

Features:

• Displaying of Emoji
• Twitter favorites
• Twitter search
• Twitter profile peek
• Ability to open links in events using a keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Right Arrow)
• Ability to send crash reports
• Ability to expand shortened URLs. Right-click on an Event and select Expand URLs

The Good:

The ability to access several core social media applications in one spot is great. The UI for EventBox is very good. Photo viewing is sublime. For twitter, users can @reply, favorite and retweet. Avatars are visible too.

The Not-so-Good:

EventBox is an excellent application. We wish it was available for PC as well…sigh. It is limited to a single twitter account at a time, and you can’t group or manage tweets in a sophisticated way, but those are minor gripes, and overshadowed by EventBox’s ease of use and integration.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ♦♦♦♦

TwitKit integrates twitter into Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux. Users can view their twitter stats and manage their twitter network easily. ♦♦♦

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that allows users to send and view tweets.

Features:

• all Twitter operations supported
• ability to search, filter and group tweets
• auto-update of threads within Twitter
• Twitpic support
• URL shortening via several different services at user’s option
• shorten tweets via Shrinktweet**
• translate tweets into any number of languages**
• in addition to TwitScoop and 12seconds video, now integration with StockTwits**
• ability to display and select recent hashtags from drop-down menu**

The Good:

TweetDeck does an excellent job of not only sending and receiving tweets, but of allowing users to manage how tweets are grouped and displayed. Additional viewing columns are created within TweetDeck each time a new filter or group is applied. This is a powerful feature and is especially useful for “power tweeters”. The extra features added by TweetDeck are very impressive.**

The Not-so-Good:

For all the great stuff that TweetDeck lets users do, there are a couple of things that are irritating shortfalls. Sometimes TweetDeck gets its Twitter API request limit numbers messed up and “hangs”. A bigger irritant, though, is the lack of multi-account support. That would truly give it “rock star” status. Finally, TweetDeck is still in beta, so everyone should be patient.

**TweetDeck has recently released a new version (v0.21.5b) with some additional features. Those are noted herein by a **. Tweetwave.com rating is now 4.0/5**

Further updated review:

TweetDeck is now on version 0.25b. The principal changes since we last reviewed TweetDeck are the addition of Facebook integration and plenty of new bugs. The Facebook integration is a good feature which adds one more social media tool to the TweetDeck toolbox. The extra bugs and hang times have been discouraging, but the TweetDeck guys are working on it, we’re sure. Our Tweetwave.com rating remains at 4.0/5.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ★★★★

Twitterrific is an application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the twitter community website. The application’s user interface is clean, concise and designed to take up a minimum of real estate on your Mac’s desktop.

Twitteriffic boasts a small desktop footprint, and the following features:

• Clean, concise UI with small desktop footprint
• Supports multiple twitter accounts
• Auto refreshing at user defined intervals
• Replies and direct messages are displayed inline
• Number of unread tweets shown in the Dock
• Delete tweets from twitter quickly and easily
• Auto show / hide when new tweets arrive
• Control over window layering and priority
• Single click access to user profile pages
• Switch between friend and public tweets easily
• Keyboard shortcuts for list navigation and more
• Control Twitterrific with AppleScript
• Audio notification for new tweets
• Hotkey to show / hide tweets

This application is also available for the iPhone® and iPod Touch®. ♦♦♦♦♦

twhirl is a desktop app that allows users to send and receive tweets, @replies and DMs.

Features:

• remembering login credentials on user’s computer
• all-in-one timeline with tweets, replies and direct messages
• configurable auto-updates for the timeline
• displaying user’s latest 20 status updates and direct messages sent
• sending status updates
• sending replies to other users (with quick buttons on others’ statuses)
• sending direct messages to other users
• showing user’s friends and followers
• deleting own status updates and direct messages
• input area can be hidden (configurable auto-hiding)
• multi-account support
• keyboard shortcuts
• sys tray / dock icon support
• audible and visual notifications
• viewing and (un)setting favorites
• (un)following users
• auto-updating the program
• changeable color schemes
• searching for public tweets (powered by terraminds)
• filtering the timeline
• ** saved searches on Twitter
• ** searching for tweets mentioning @username
• ** Ping.fm support for twitter and laconi.ca/identi.ca
• ** video recording
• ** English spell checking
• ** bit.ly short URL support

The Good:

twhirl is a great multi-account Twitter desktop client based on AIR and Flex. It sports a compact UI, keyboard shortcuts, many features like auto-connect, auto-refreshing tweets, sending updates, replies, direct messages and more. Users are able to filter tweets, lookup other users to follow/unfollow and shorten URLs. Twitpic is supported.

The Not-so-Good:

This application is easy to use, but note it is not open-source. That won’t be a big issue for most users. Although you can filter tweets for a particular keyword, it isn’t possible to filter groups of users for display. Other than that, there seem to be few complaints, except perhaps that more color schemes/themes would be good. The multiple account support is a huge bonus feature.

**On 9 Feb 09, twhirl released an update with some new features (shown above with **). Our rating is now up to 4.5 / 5.**

Tweetwave.com rates it: ♦♦♦♦

Blogo - A weblog editor which is also a full-featured Twitter client integrated with Twitpic, tinyURL, tweetburner and Ping.fm. Blogo is more than simply a Twitter client: it provides a simple, intuitive interface and support for Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal and Expression Engine. An Apple staff pick. ♦♦♦♦♦

BigTweet - BigTweet installs as a bookmarklet and allows you to post to Twitter from any web page.

Features:

• login with Twitter credentials
• choose 140 or 240 characters for length of tweet
• shorten URLs using Bit.ly API
• insert special Unicode characters

The Good:

Big Tweet is a great way to create a tweet about web pages that you visit. It is an easy-to-use widget with many features: choose a classic 140 character update, or a 240 character tweet; Insert special Unicode characters and shorten URLs with the Bit.ly API right from the bookmarklet window and automatically capture the current page title, URL and any highlighted text. No registration is required - only Twitter login credentials are needed.

The Not-so-Good:

Big Tweet is a brilliant little widget. In the past, the only odd thing we encountered was that, on occasion, the widget would get “buried” under some graphics on a few websites. That could have been a Firefox thing; we’re not sure. It didn’t happen very often, and appears to have been fixed, so we can’t really complain too much.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ★★★★