I recently came across some another desktop Twitter client called TweetDeck. TweetDeck runs on the AIR platform and is currently in private beta, but anyone can download it. Its aim is to take all your tweets and break them down into manageable pieces. In my opinion, it does an excellent job of doing just that.

User Interface:

The main window is simple, clean, and well-designed. Users can choose how many columns they want, up to 10. The left column shows your timeline, which is required. The middle column shows all of my replies, and the right column shows all the tweets for a custom group. There are two more columns you can’t see - one showing my direct messages, and the other showing a global search for my Twitter name. That pane shows all tweets where my name is mentioned. You can set that search criteria to whatever you want. To get TweetDeck to show these, you have to move the main slider left or right.

Along the top toolbar, you can choose to display any number of panes consisting of groups, searches, replies, and direct messages. One of the nice things about TweetDeck is the ability to sort users into groups so you can manage tweets for a specific set of people.

The bottom toolbar shows when TweetDeck last updated, how many new tweets it found, and when it will update again. You can also specify your timeframe, so if you only want to see tweets in the last 2 hours, then you can easily do that with the slider.

User Experience:

This is one of those applications that’s just a joy to use. There are a number of enhancements I’d like to see that prevent me from giving it 5 stars, which are listed below. I found this application to be easy to use and intuitive. It’s not cumbersome or intimidating, but feels friendly. Most of the major Twitter functions (retweet, reply, DM) are included directly in the application in a well-layed out way.

Features:

This is where TweetDeck heads downhill. Understanding that it is currently beta software, I still feel that there are a number of critical components that are missing. First and foremost is a notification system. TweetDeck shows how many tweets were found in the last update, but if I’m gone for two or three updates, I have no idea how many came in. That leads me to the second key missing feature, which is the ability to distinguish the tweets I’ve read from the tweets I haven’t read.

System Performance:

TweetDeck feels snappy and responsive. There is no lag when switching between panes, doing group management, or adding new panes. The only lag comes from API calls and processing responses. On my Windows machine, TweetDeck is consuming around 60 MB of RAM. When minimized, TweetDeck takes anywhere from 9 to 20 MB of RAM. This feels a little steep since it doesn’t have to render windows or anything. It seems that when you minimize TweetDeck and then bring it up, it helps keep resources low as opposed to leaving it up all the time.

Overall Impression:

I give TweetDeck a 3.5 because of the key features that are missing. It’s not most fully-featured client I’ve seen so far, but it does a nice job of keeping your content manageable. I would expect that a number of my complaints will be addressed and included in coming releases. TweetDeck seems to be striving toward power and simplicity. It’s also supposed to queue your tweets for when Twitter is under the weather, but they’ve disabled that feature for the time being.

What’s Missing

As with any beta software, there are improvements that need to be made (see what other users are saying).

• User resizeable window! Right now you get either max window or default window. Turns out you can do this, it just doesn’t show the arrows that signify the ability to resize an object.
• Notifications, preferably by sound and a notification window, when new tweets come in (with the option to silence notifications).
• Distinguish an unread tweet from a read tweet. This could be done by different colors or something simple, but it would be nice to know what has already been seen.
• Drag-and-drop group management. Instead of displaying all my friends and having me check the ones I want to put in the group, it would be nice to just drag them to the pane.
• Drag-and-drop pane management, replacing the “Move Left” and “Move Right” buttons
• Have links show up a different color. Right now they show up just like any other text.
• Search for users (like in Twhirl), with the ability to follow and unfollow users.
• Customizable API call frequencies, so we can adjust how often it should check for us. Right now it’s defaulted to 5 minutes, but once Twitter gets their act together it could check every minute.

None of the above suggestions will prevent me from using TweetDeck in its current status. I think the developers have done a marvelous job so far. I’m not quite ready to dump the web client yet, but TweetDeck makes me want to.