Nambu: New Twitter Client Rocks the Mac Desktop
Nambu is a curiously-named but powerful new desktop client for Mac OS X that’s built for Twitter addicts. Its primary strength is that it offers an interface for Twitter not unlike Apple’s Mail client. Nambu also manages to pack in most of the features found in its competitors and offers some very cool additions of its own, including threaded conversations, support for multiple Twitter accounts and the ability to isolate tweets with links.
Nambu offers three different ways to see your messages: the Mail-like view where your friends, groups, saved searches and more live in a left-hand column and tweets show up in the left pane; a single column river, not unlike the Twitter website; and a multi-column view similar to the very popular TweetDeck client.
Nambu also offers all the power user features you’d expect from a desktop Twitter client, like custom filters, built-in photo sharing and link shortening (no, short links are not ideal, but that’s your only real option at the moment), persistent searches and the ability to track trends through popular hashtags or keywords.
Nambu has two standout features that sold me. The first is a threaded conversation view. Any @reply tweets show up inline with the post they are replying to, making it much easier to follow the thread of conversation (@replies also show up as regular tweets, so if you mark a post as read, you’ll still see any replies to it).
The second killer feature is the multi-column view, which, when combined with the ability to create Twitter groups, allows me to easily track the people I’m following for work, those I follow for fun and so on, without missing anything due to message overload.
Unfortunately, as much as I like Nambu, it is a beta release and there are bugs. The app has crashed twice since I started testing it and occasionally suffers from screen refresh glitches — for example, columns in multi-column view sometimes fail to close and marking items read in a group does not always mark it as read in the home view.
Still, when it comes to Mac-native Twitter clients, Nambu is well ahead of the pack. It has all the right features and hopefully future releases will iron out the bugs. I’d particularly recommended it to Mac users who like TweetDeck, but want a more “Mac-like” application. TweetDeck runs on Adobe’s AIR technology, so it looks and behaves like a desktop app, but its interface uses a visual language closer to what you’d find on the web. Also, AIR apps feel a little more sluggish than their desktop counterparts. Most people won’t notice, but those who do will appreciate the snappiness you get with a native desktop app.
There’s also a companion iPhone application (App Store link) that’s comparatively simple, but also free.
At the moment, Nambu is Twitter-only, but the developers plan to add support for Identi.ca, FriendFeed and Ping.fm in the near future.
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