As a public alpha, Tweetbot for Mac is already off to a good start. I’ve been using it for about a week and have had but one bug that was fixed in the version that’s shipping today.
What I’m most looking forward to is the syncing of timeline location, and read/unread status of @replies and direct messages. This won’t happen until Tweetbot for Mac ships via the Mac App Store because of its need to use iCloud for syncing between the Mac and iOS apps.
One of the things I love about Tapbots’ software is the playfulness and clever interactions. It will be interesting to see how that personality translates from touch-based iOS apps to a trackpad-based OS X app.
Something else I’m intrigued by is Tapbots’ change in marketing strategy. Up until now all their app releases have been kept a tight secret (well, Tweetbot for iPhone got leaked simply because folks were testing it, but no other news of it was shared).
In a Q&A with Matthew Panzarino on The Next Web, Paul Haddad answers the reasoning. Paul says:
We wanted to do something different, we can’t really do any wide scale alpha/beta testing on iOS and so that’s never been an option. We’ve also gotten so many requests for Tweetbot for Mac that we felt even an incomplete product would be really appreciated and useful for lots of our users. Doing an Alpha also let’s us get lots of feedback on what’s important for people and we can make the first paid release even better.