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.

App.net

If you haven’t heard about App.net, it’s a new ad-free and developer friendly social network. App.net lets you post 256 character messages to your friends and followers around the world, without any extraneous noise. They are very much committed to making the best user experience possible for the end user, without focusing on needs of advertisers or corporations.

We’ve been working very closely with App.net. Their goals of always putting users first resonates with what we believe at Tapbots. Even though App.net is currently a small network, we expect big things from them and are proud to be a part of the community.

Push, Direct Messages and more.

App.net is a relatively new social network so there are a number of features that you may be used to that currently aren’t available. Chief among these are push notifications and private messaging. The App.net crew is well aware of these limitations and have been working towards quickly getting those features in place. Once the proper APIs are in place we plan to fully support all those features.

If App.net sounds like a network you want to be a part of, head over to the App Store and buy Netbot for iPhone and Netbot for iPad!

How does this token cap stuff work anyways?

There’s been a lot of misinformation going around about how these caps work, so now might be a good time to clear up some misconceptions.

• As of August 16th 2012 3rd party Twitter clients have a fixed number of tokens, either 100k or if they are already above 100k, 2 times the number of tokens they had on that date.
• These caps are only in place for 3rd party Twitter clients, non client applications have no such limits.
• These caps are per “application” meaning a developer can have different caps for different apps.
• If you login to the same account with the same app on multiple devices that takes a single token from the app’s pool.
• If you login to multiple accounts with the same app, you are using multiple tokens from that app pool.
• If you go on the Twitter website and navigate to Settings -> Apps and hit the “Revoke access” button you are returning one of those tokens back to the app’s pool.
• As of now, tokens don’t expire. If you log in to an application once that token is considered in use until you “Revoke access” to it.

With the above rules being in place its easy to see why continuing the public alpha/beta would be problematic. Someone might use the app, decide they don’t like it and the token would be gone forever. That being said now would probably be a good time to help 3rd party developers out and Revoke access to any clients that you no longer use.

Just to be perfectly clear, Tweetbot for Mac will still be available for sale in the near future, we are just stopping the public part of the alpha/beta testing. We wish we could continue on but we didn’t make the rules, we just have to live within them. Again sorry for the hassle and thank you very much to everyone that has provided valuable feedback during the alpha.

Mostly Harmless

The changes to the v1.1 API requiring authentication won’t affect Tweetbot, all current API calls are already made using authentication. The new rate limits that are part of the v1.1 API will likely end up being a good thing, instead of having a fixed block calls that can be made across the entire API the limits will be based on specific actions. We actually expect this to minimize the chances of being stuck in “Twitter Jail”. As an example, if you refresh your timeline over 60 times in an hour, you’ll still be able to post or DM. In general assuming the numbers listed on Twitter’s side remain consistent this should make for an overall better user experience.

User Caps

I can’t say that I’m thrilled with the idea of caps on the number of users, I feel that part of what makes the Twitter ecosystem interesting is the wide ranging apps available to it. I think we and others fill an important niche in that system not served by the current Twitter apps and would’ve much preferred to see some some other approach. Regardless the decision has been made, so let’s look at what this actually means to Tweetbot.
* Our user cap for Tweetbot for iOS is pretty huge (which is 2* our current users, not 100k)
* At the current rate our user base is growing we won’t hit that cap for a few years
* Our user cap for Tweetbot for Mac is also large and we don’t expect any problems given the smaller market
* Even if we were to run out of room all our current users will be fine
* User tokens are shared, so if you have a single account on both Tweetbot for iPad and Tweetbot for iPhone that’s only a single token

So again Tweetbot isn’t going anywhere, if you are worried about us running out of space well the solution is quite simple buy or gift Tweetbot for iPhone and Tweetbot for iPad now. So go out, share and enjoy!

New Display Requirements

We’ll be working with Twitter over the next 6 months to make sure we comply with these new requirements as much as possible. I don’t expect the changes to be huge, but we’ll keep everyone up to date as we know more.

Future

The beta of Tweetbot for Mac will be coming soon, shortly followed by the final release in the Mac App Store. All three versions of Tweetbot are based on the same low level code base, so once that’s out we expect to continue to add new and exciting features to all 3 apps.

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

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.

Now this isn’t a particularly big deal for us since we already had code in place, for Tweetbot 2.3, that removes the need for UDID. It was a simple matter of moving that code back into 2.2 and re-submitting to Apple. We had a fixed version updated and uploaded to Apple within 2 hours of getting this message and are once again waiting for approval. If you are an app developer and depend on UDID for any functionality it’s time to migrate away from it, sooner or later Apple will catch you.

Why did we use UDIDs? We used them only for our push notification services in order to be able to match up a given device to its push notification settings. This allowed us to restore push notifications settings after Tweetbot was deleted and re-installed. With this new change in place this is no longer possible, if you delete and re-install Tweetbot you’ll have to setup your push notification settings again. Your device’s UDID never went anywhere besides our push notification services and has never been shared with anyone.

• iPad graphics optimized for the new iPad’s retina display
• Streaming (when on WiFi with settings to disable it)
• The “new tweets” sound is now limited to mentions, DM’s, and new tweets via pull-to-refresh
• Double-tapping on the timeline tab button takes you to last read tweet before going to the top
• Improvements to the Tweetmarker service
• Camera+ 3.0 Capturing/Editing Support
• Bug fixes related to direct messages
• Many other bug fixes

Tweetbot for iPad is now version 2.1

Since we plan to release updates to both the iPhone and iPad apps in parity, we decided to bump the iPad version up to 2.1. Both apps share a lot of underlying code so it only makes sense that their version numbers are in sync.

Streaming

We are excited to announce streaming in Tweetbot for the iPhone and iPad. What is streaming you ask? Instead of pull-to-refresh to check for new tweets or waiting for the 5 minute auto-refresh to take place, tweets appear instantly in your timeline as they are published.

There are a few limitations to streaming which Twitter has put in place:

• Streaming only works over WiFi. Tweetbot will automatically turn streaming on and off depending on your network status.
• Streaming is limited to running on three versions of Tweetbot at a given time per user account.

iPad version ready for Retina

Tweetbot 2.1 for the iPad is now retina-ready for the upcoming new iPad. Just like you, we can’t wait to see how Tweetbot will look on the new retina display.

New Camera+ 3.0 Support

With the release of Taptaptap’s Camera+ 3.0, you can now use Cam+ to edit or take photos for Tweetbot. If you have Cam+ 3.0 installed on your device, there will be new options when you are in the menu to add an image to a tweet.

Fixed:
* DMs not working for iOS 4.x devices.
* Lists losing their positions.
* TweetMarker not working properly.
* Arabic, Thai, possibly other keyboards not functioning correctly.
* Video upload settings lost on restart.

We have no control over how fast Apple approves the update, but we’re hoping that it’ll be sometime late next week.

As with the original Tweetbot for iPhone, version 1.0 is about getting you a solid first version. We still have a lot of work ahead of us so we appreciate your support! We have a lot of great stuff coming in the pipeline.

We are anticipating some of you wondering why the app is not universal so let me briefly explain. As you know, releasing quality software takes a lot of time. We anticipated working on the iPad version for around 3 months. It turned out to be over 6. We love what we do, but the bottom line is Tapbots is a business and the end goal is for us to make a living. We are just 2 guys at this company both with a family/kids to take care of. We also think charging $3 for each version is fair considering most of the other universal twitter apps charge more. If you don’t have an iPhone or iPad, you aren’t stuck paying more for a universal version.

So that’s about it! We hope you enjoy the new app and we will be working hard on bringing you improvements. Buy Tweetbot for the iPad here!