Nambu makes Twitter feel natural for Mac users

For a while now I've been using TweetDeck to access my Twitter account. While I love many of the features that TweetDeck has made popular I always struggle with the UI. Though it's quite usable the fact that it's built on top of Adobe Air means it doesn't look quite right on my Mac's OS X desktop.

I've tried a number of different Twitter clients for Mac but none worked quite as well as TweetDeck did for me. Then along came Nambu, which is still in beta. Nambu looks and feels like a normal OS X application. The design is similar to TweetDeck in some respects but has some key enhancements that make it much more powerful.

Multiple Twitter Accounts
I have two Twitter accounts that I use: dalison and sharedstatus. The former is my personal account where I ramble on about my blog, Macs, sports and things I find amusing on the Interwebs. The latter is an account for my main product and I use it to announce features and generally cover business related topics. Fortunately Nambu supports multiple Twitter accounts and allows me to keep on top of my feeds for both quite easily in a single interface.

Multiple Views
Nambu has three basic views: Combined, Sidebar and Multi Column. The Combined view is a complete feed from all of the people you follow in every account you have added to Nambu. I don't use it because the noise factor is quite high. The Sidebar view is a little more functional and for people that are screen real estate constrained (working from a 13" MacBook for example) may be a good solution.

For those that are lucky enough to have lots of screen available the Multi Column view is the place to be. For the same reason I like TweetDeck, the Multi Column view allows you to set up multiple panes to watch key feeds, including search results on a specific topic.


Another advantage of the Multi Column view is the ability to create groups of people you are currently following. If you tend to follow a lot of people but want to create a view that includes only selected people so they don't get lost in the noise then you can create a group and display a panel with their feeds.

Unread Markers
While TweetDeck can handle unread markers it doesn't update the Dock icon, something that a native Mac application like Nambu can and does. There is even the option of limiting the unread counts to all of your views (which can be quite high) or to just messages that are sent to you directly.

Support for more than just Twitter
As of right now Nambu supports Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca and Ping.fm. Much like Adium supports multiple chat services (AIM, Google Chat, etc.), Nambu is a striving to be a collection point for social media services. I personally don't use the other services so I have no idea if they are well serviced in Nambu.

Beta Software - Bugs On Deck
While I've generally found Nambu to be stable it is beta software and as a result has some bugs. Updates are coming out quite frequently and many people are reporting that the most recent update (1.1.8) is crashing quite frequently, though I've been running it most of the morning and it has not crashed on me. If you decide to try out Nambu you should also follow Nambucom on Twitter; they are providing pretty regular updates and that seems to be the best vehicle for getting questions answered.

There are a number of existing Mac specific Twitter clients available right now with more coming along all the time. This space is going to get highly competitive for a while which is outstanding for Mac users. If you have a Mac specific client for Twitter that you really like please drop a note in the comments and share.