macintom.ca

Nambu: Mac Client for Twitter (and others)

From their website:

The Nambu Network is creating the best possible social messaging experience: seemlessly integrated with a superior look and feel.

Nambu OS X is still in beta, but progressing quickly.

It currently has Twitter and FriendFeed integration, identa.ca and Laconi.ca.

You are not required to create a Nambu Network account (I didn't), but if you do, it lets you use the tr.im, pic.im & snip.im networks.

I will focus on how it functions as a Mac desktop client for Twitter.

I stumbled across this yesterday when doing yet another Google search for Mac desktop Twitter clients, with the same common search results; Twitterific, Twhirl, TweetDeck, Eventbox, etc. Then I saw Nambu, which I hadn't seen before, so I decided to check it out.

Nambu was a free download, and it was extremely easy to set up for my Twitter accounts (supports multiple accounts), and the first thing that caught my attention was that there are 3 different viewing options. Single Column View, Sidebar View (like iTunes), and Multiple Column View (like TweetDeck). There are drop down options in the Single and Mulitple View so that you can customize the views. There is a button that appears at the top of the Mulitple View window that allows you to add as many columns as you want.

The top window has View buttons, Reload button, Compose button, and search bar that will search Twitter, and it places the search results in the sidebar of the Sidebar View. When you compose a message you can select with which account you want to post in. I like how TweetDeck adds a column with your search results automatically, with Nambu you have to do this manually if you are in Multiple Column View It does the same!!(it didn't seem to work first time I tried it). Another feature I found missing was the ability to delete tweets, which you can do with other desktop clients.

Overall I really like the desktop application, and within 24 hours of using it, I can say that it will probably be my default twitter application. I love the different views, and another cool feature is that it will thread replies (see screenshot).

They do make an iPhone application which I downloaded and tried (also free), and it had one major flaw that caused me to delete it. There was no easy way to view Replies or DM's only. The icons at the bottom can be eidited, but only to show other services, not to add options within each service (like adding a reply button, or messages button). I will definitely stay with Tweetie for iPhone tweets.

Pictures always help with a review, so here are some screenshots and annotations.

Download NAMBU here.