Review: Echofon For Mac

Here is another  client, but its just not you ‘usual’ Twitter client. This one is like Tweetie, very simple clean and cut. Echofon does not take up much screen space which is a huge factor in my book. Something like tweetdeck that will take up your whole screen isnt something I am really fond of. I would really rather have echofon rather than tweetdeck for that one reason. But dont let the small factor fool you it has many features. Lets take a look at a picture.

As you can see its very simple. You have your Timeline for the people your following, mentions, direct messages, lists, and search. Its a compact view, If you want to look at their profile you can click that  profile picture in the time line and a drawer will open. In the image above you see that I’ve pointed a blue arrow at something in the timeline. Thats the new Twitter Retweet feature. Echofon has  for it and it looks slick! You can still choose to retweet the way old that echofon calls “RT with comment” which follows: RT @thatperson. But the new way just makes it much easier for other people to see the original tweet.


From the drawer menu you can see all their tweets, whos following them and who they are following, you can also block, unblock, follow, unfollow, reply, and DM a user. Right below that they have added support for twitter lists, you can see what lists these people are a part of and what lists they made.

Search
: The last  I want to talk about is the search, now this is the coolest thing they could do for the search ‘home.’ Echofon automatically pulls all the trending topics from Twitter and puts them as the home for the search menu. You can click any of these and look further into them. It pulls the 10 latest trending topics from twitter.

Conclusion: All in all I think this twitter client has many ways to come, but then again its only in beta. I think once it becomes around 1.5 this twitter client is going to be big, even bigger than tweeite. I think the best part of this twitter client is the developers behind it are avid. They are always fixing bugs and always implementing new twitter features.
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  • Rewai
    Albeit in Beta, moved from Tweetie to Echofon for Mac. Tired of no development of Tweetie for Mac.

    One simple thing that encouraged me to switch was the ability to "Unfavourite" which is not possible on Tweetie. They said they're going to fix it and brought out an update and six months later it's still not fixed.

    On switching to Echofon I discovered a fantastic feature I don't see mentioned in this review, which is the integration between the Mac and iPhone App. Whatever device you use, if you go to the other device, Echofon syncs your unread Tweets.
  • robertdel12
    Ah yes I did leave that out, I am planning on reviewing the iPhone version here soon and I will bring that up. Its actually pretty awesome that all this is free and the service from echofon is much better than tweetie which costs money.
  • Rewai
    Interested to hear that it's all free.

    I'm ok about paying modest amounts for stuff I use, I like a business model that's sustainable, it means the product is likely to exist and develop to being even better.

    What particularly annoyed me about Tweetie for Mac is that I paid them to support them, but they seem to have taken my Tweetie for Mac money and invested it in the iPhone App. I'm actually quite annoyed by their approach and their repeated but empty promises that they are doing an upgrade.
  • robertdel12
    Well it does come at a cost of ads. I'm not sure if the Mac version will be free when its out of beta which kind of annoys me.

    Yeah they seem to make many promises and never deliver. I've been waiting for an update to tweetie for a while now and they seem to just not care. Thats why I love echofon, for now they seem to care about who uses their software and updates when they can.
  • Switched over to Tweetdeck last night. Really like (and miss) Echofon's UI, but last few days have been really awful - network issues all over the place. No idea why, because TweetDeck worked fine, and so did the twitter website while Echofon was acting up. Again, the Echofon UI I believe is superior. I might try it again, because the crazy-busy Tweetdeck UI and all the tiny buttons are just too much. And I'm a tech/programmer - so I generally get complex systems.
  • robertdel12
    Thanks for the comment! I had the very same problem with tweetie about 6 months ago. I dont know what resolved the issue but it ended up stopping after a little while. Yeah I agree I tried tweetdeck and its just way too crowded.
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