If you’ve ever been wondering which Twitter client you could have used if Loren didn’t come up with his amazing app Tweetie, I think we have the answer now. It’s called Itsy, it was unknown until some days ago when someone talked about it on – guess what – Twitter and it could be your new favorite Twitter client for Mac OS X.
Itsy is minimalism applied to Twitter. The interface is uncluttered, elegant and simple: there’s a top “toolbar” which contains five icons (Home, Replies, DMs, Search and Post) and just nothing more. Every tweet comes in the form of a bubble, much like Tweetie already does, and you can reply, retweet or fav a tweet. Clicking on a user’s avatar opens the Twitter profile page, and this means there’s no “users navigation” (Tweetie has it, for instance). Mentions and pictures are integrated in the timeline, with support for Twitpic and yfrog: you can check off this stuff in the Preferences anyways. I wish pictures would also popup in a HUD-ish panel, but you know – it’s about minimalism.
The greatest thing about Itsy in my opinion are the animations: they are based on .js files (just take a look at the Resources folder) and the transition between – say – the timeline and replies is smoothless and nice. Same applies for posting a new tweet or replying to someone: hit the compose button and the text field slowly comes down from the top and fades away as the tweet goes online. Also, if this thing becomes popular I think we’ll see a lot of hand made custom themes for it.
I don’t know if Itsy is an amateur project or the developer has some plans for it. What I’m sure about is that if the dev will ever decide to refine and improve Itsy, it could seriously become a real alternative to Tweetie. There’s a thin line between minimalism and too many features, but Itsy misses basic stuff like threaded DMs, multi accounts, saved searches, old style retweets and in-app navigation. By now, Itsy is a basic and simple Twitter client for people who have very basic needs. And if you’re among these people, Itsy is your new favorite Twitter app.
#1
That's what Tom said 8 months ago:
I was about to say "why did they change the default UI with the close/min/max buttons?" then realised it’s a custom skin, yeah?
Anyway, It’s a very cute lightweight twitter client – and if it’s free, then I might ditch tweetie so I can avoid to the shareware nags
[Reply]
Justin Reply:
January 4th, 2010
@Tom, All of Federico’s screenshots from the site look like that, so it’s a custom theme on his Mac, not the application itself, just in case anyone was confused.
[Reply]
storiesofmac Reply:
January 4th, 2010
@Justin, Indeed. As I wrote many times before, I have a custom Mac OS X theme. Maybe I’ll write a post about it
[Reply]
#2
That's what mangochutney said 8 months ago:
I’m just afraid that itsy will pale in the light of Tweetie 2 for the Mac once it is released.
I will try it, as it looks extremely promising.
[Reply]
#3
That's what MisterJack said 8 months ago:
Is really cute, but it lacks some features that hurt me.
E.g. it always auto scrolls to top, and that’s bad.
I hope Tweetie 2 will have a decent UI.
MJ
[Reply]
#4
That's what Andre said 8 months ago:
I like this Client and it´s minimal small design very much. I´ve written a german Blogpost about it on my Weblog.
[Reply]
#5
That's what JB said 8 months ago:
Tried this today and like it. Have you used Echofon for Mac though? A tad less pretty, but it shares the minimalism, and offers a few more features. I’ve been using Echofon for one of my accounts and Tweetie for the other; now I’ll be replacing Tweetie with Itsy. I too have high hopes for Tweetie 2. We’ll see. We’ve certainly come a long way in Mac-native clients.
[Reply]