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I'm what you would consider a Twitter power user.
Checking my Twitter feed is a constant habit throughout the day, whether I'm looking for the latest tech news or a funny GIF.
There are plenty of third-party Twitter apps on the Mac to choose from, including Twitter's official app and TweetDeck. A lot of people use TweetDeck, but I can't stand the design. It also doesn't do everything I want, like save links to read later.
Tweetbot has been my favorite Twitter app for years on the iPhone, but its Mac app has been in sore need of a redesign for some time. Today is the day that Tweetbot finally looks great again on the Mac, and here's why you should use it instead of TweetDeck.
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First off, the new design of Tweetbot for Mac is just gorgeous.
It looks great in OS X Yosemite, the newest Mac operating system, and makes the old version feel completely outdated.
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One of my favorite features is the ability to search my timeline for keywords.
So if I search "Business Insider," I see all activity from my BI colleagues.
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The main reason people love TweetDeck is for its multiple column layout, but Tweetbot does that too.
Tweetbot is an app for people who want to get a lot out of their Twitter experience. It has integration with services like Instapaper and Pocket for saving links to read later, and the ability to mute specific people, keywords, hashtags, and even tweets from certain apps. You can save searches, manage Twitter lists, and do just about everything else you'd want to do when using Twitter.
But the main reason I love Tweetbot is my timeline syncs with iCloud, Apple's cloud service. It lets me pick up where I left off in my timeline between my iPhone and Mac, and it works seamlessly. So if I'm reading Twitter on the train and get to my desk at work, I can pick up in my timeline exactly where I stopped reading on my iPhone.
If you care about not skipping over tweets in your timeline like I do, Tweetbot's syncing is a killer feature.
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There are also a lot of improvements under the hood that make the new Tweetbot faster and better, and its developers told Business Insider that more features are planned for a future update.
One of the biggest downsides to Tweetbot right now is that you can't do group DMs, meaning you can't send private messages to more than on person. So if you rely heavily on that feature, I recommend sticking with one of Twitter's official apps. It also costs $12.99, which means it definitely isn't for everyone.
But if you already have the current version of Tweetbot, it's a free update available in the Mac App Store.