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We are very happy to announce that Tweetbot for Mac is finally available for sale on the Mac App Store! It’s been a long (and bumpy) road, but we are glad we have finally made it to the 1.0 milestone. This is our first official Mac App from Tapbots (unless you want to count Pastebot Sync), and thanks to Todd Thomas for all his hard work, we have something to be proud of. But it doesn’t end here. We are working on version 1.1 and have much more coming to all versions of Tweetbot.

For now, learn more about Tweetbot for Mac and purchase it on the Mac App Store.

Why is Tweetbot for Mac $20?

If you think about it, it’s not that expensive. Twenty dollars for a quality piece of software that you use every day? That has been the price point for quality utility apps on the Mac for years. However, it’s not just the development time and attention we put into the app that commands the higher price.

Because of Twitter’s recent enforcement of token limits, we only have a limited number of tokens available for Tweetbot for Mac. These tokens dictate how many users Tweetbot for Mac can have. The app’s limit is separate from, but much smaller than, the limit for Tweetbot for iOS. Once we use up the tokens granted to us by Twitter, we will no longer be able to sell the app to new users. Tapbots will continue to support Tweetbot for Mac for existing customers at that time.

This limit and our desire to continue to support the app once we sell out is why we’ve priced Tweetbot for Mac a little higher than we’d like. It’s the best thing we can do for the long term viability of the product. We know some will not be happy about Tweetbot for Mac’s pricing, but the bottom line is Twitter needs to provide us with more tokens for us to be able to sell at a lower the price. We spent a year developing this app and it’s the only way for us to be able to make our money back and continue supporting it with updates in the future. Feel free to let Twitter know how you feel about it.

If you’ve used the Alphas/Betas and have decided not to purchase, please do us a huge favor and Revoke access; that frees up extra tokens for potential customers (the betas will expire anyways). We truly appreciate your support whether you make the purchase or not. You guys have been a great help during the beta process.

As some of you may have already noticed the download link for the Tweetbot for Mac alpha no longer works. Twitter’s latest API Changes means now we have a large but finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac. We’ve been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with a solution that was acceptable to them. Because of this we’ve decided its best for us to pull the alpha.

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There’s been a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt generated by Twitter’s latest announcement. I wanted to let everyone know that the world isn’t ending, Tweetbot for Mac is coming out soon, Tweetbot for iOS isn’t going anywhere. So sit down, grab a towel and let’s go over some of these API changes.

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It’s finally here! (sort of)

Tweetbot for Mac is finally available! However it may not be quite as you had hoped. Developing for the Mac is no easy task, especially a full-featured Twitter client. However, we’ve gotten to a point where while not complete, it is useable. We’ve decided to release it as a public alpha to a) motivate us to finish faster, and b) get feedback to help us build the best Mac incarnation of Tweetbot we can make. You can love it or hate it, but rest assured it will only get much much better from here.

Introducing a new scientist.

As you may have noticed, Paul has been hard at work this year with many great updates to the iOS versions of Tweetbot. So how have we been working just as hard on a Mac version at the same time? We would like to introduce our Canadian friend, Todd Thomas (@toddthomas). While much of the underlying twitter code is Paul’s, Todd has been working hard to bring Tweetbot to the Mac. Follow him on twitter, but don’t bug him too much as he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.

So what can I expect from this alpha?

Bugs! Lots of them.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Sending us bug and crash reports will help us out a lot. You can do so by hitting “Send Feedback” from the Help menu in Tweetbot for Mac.

Missing features.

We’ve been focusing on replicating the core features of our iOS versions. Features like multiple windows will be coming in the future. You can open a new window by hitting command-shift-n, but rest assure it will be much more elegant in the future.

Disturbing graphics and performance issues.

Okay, not disturbing to most of you, but some designers can get pretty disgusted by the slightest mis-aligned pixel. Don’t be alarmed, we plan on making everything as beautiful and pixel perfect as we can. Throwing things on the canvas is just part of our process. And no, the egg icon isn’t the final icon. It was thrown together for alpha/beta purposes. We also spend most of our time optimizing performance towards the end of development.

No support.

This is a public alpha so run it at your own risk. When you run into issues, we’d love it if you would send us a report. However we can’t respond or spend time helping you get things up and running or else we’ll end up spending time with support and not getting the app done.

No Notification Center or iCloud support (in the alpha/beta).

There’s no way we can offer them until the app is signed and goes through the app store. They will work in the shipping product.

Updates and Expiring alpha/betas.

Updates will be automatically pushed out to you. We suggest you install them as each new build will fix bugs and possibly add new functionality. Old builds will also expire after a certain period of time.

Answers to some common questions.

Will Tweetbot for Mac be free?

No, we plan to charge for the app in the app store once we hit version 1.0. Until then, you get to use our app for free. Think of it as a long term trial. When we hit 1.0, you’ll know whether it’s worth your hard earned cash or not.

How long will it be in alpha/beta?

As long as it needs to be. We would like to earn money for our hard work as soon as possible, but we won’t sell anything short of a quality product.

How much will you charge for it?

We haven’t decided yet.

Is it retina ready?

For the most part yes. However some of us are still waiting for our retina macbook pros so until then, there are a few glitches here and there.

Which versions of OS X will it support?

The alpha version supports 10.7+, but the shipping product will only support 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or later. We will be taking full advantage of features only available in 10.8. We will most likely be dropping 10.7 support sometime after 10.8 is available to the public.

So um…where do I get this so called “alpha”?

Right here: http://tapbots.com/tweetbot_mac

iCloud Sync is a feature that landed last Friday in Tweetbot version 2.2. There’s been a few questions about how it works and some have had issues getting it up and running. Hopefully this post will clear things up for some of you.

What is iCloud Sync?

With Tweetbot v2.2 or later, your mute filters and direct message read/unread status will be synced across all instances of Tweetbot. So if you mute someone on your iPhone, they will also be muted on your iPad. The same goes for direct messages. Read a DM in one place and it will be marked as read on your other devices.

Another feature of iCloud sync is keeping your timeline position in sync across your devices. This allows you to pick up where you left off reading in your timeline when going between them. In the past we’ve had Tweetmarker support which is a free third party service that allowed you to sync your timeline with any twitter client that supported this service. Tweetmarker is still an option for those who need it, however for everyone else, syncing your read position via iCloud is enabled by default. While it sometimes takes up to 30 seconds to sync, it works brilliantly.

What is the blue bookmark icon for?

This icon shows you the tweet that has been bookmarked as the last read position. However since this icon has confused so many people, we have removed it and will no longer show in Tweetbot v2.3.

I can’t get iCloud Sync to work at all. Help?

For most it should just work. But some of you might have altered the default configuration of Tweetbot and iCloud which prevent this feature to work properly. Here are a few steps to take:

• In the iOS settings, go to iCloud and make sure you are logged into the service (with the same iCloud account on both devices)
• In the iOS settings, go to iCloud and make sure “Documents & Data” are enabled. If “Use Cellular” is turned off, iCloud Sync may not work if you are not on a wifi network.
• In Tweetbot, go to your Settings -> Username (under Account Settings) -> Sync and make sure iCloud is selected on both devices for the same account
• If it’s still not working, try rebooting your device. The next step would be to try re-installing Tweetbot.

If you are still having issues, there’s not much more we can say to help besides asking you to try going through these steps again. We don’t have any access to iCloud itself so it’s hard to troubleshoot the issue any further.