There are no shortage of Twitter clients out there. While quite a few people have their own personal favorites, we never shy away at the oppurtunity to look at a new competitor. Our personal favorite is the free rendition of TweetDeck because it works, especially allowing us to see tons of information about our evergrowing library of Twitter accounts. However, to our knowledge Tweetie remains the beloved favorite amongst hardcore Mac tweeters and we aren’t sure why: Tweetie’s UI is slick, but there is tons of improvement. How we came to that conclusion? We played around with Kiwi from YourHead.

Introducing Kiwi

Mmm… We’re hungry. Setting up Kiwi is relatively easy, but then again this is Twitter, it’s not exactly supposed to be mind-boggling. Assuming you already have an account, you add said account via username and password. After that’s done you can chose one of the many themes Kiwi offers for free (more on that later.) Then you are supposed to go the site to learn how to use Kiwi, or you can just keep reading the review.

Using Kiwi

Kiwi’s main window functions with six icons: Account, Timeline, @user, Retweet, Direct Messaging and Favorite Timeline. All of these icons can be hidden to make Kiwi even more minimalist, although navigation becomes a tad bit more difficult. On the bottom smaller icons for a new tweet, refresh and a search bar. Clicking the new tweet button brings up a new window that includes a character count, link shorteners, image attachments and options to change accounts.

The Basics

Kiwi is one of the easiest applications to use without ever looking up how to control it. Why you ask? Because it’s Twitter and the app is designed the right way. Switching between accounts, writing new Tweets, sending DMs – all of it is the exact way one would expect it to be. Kiwi takes the simplicity of both the Twitter and Mac platforms and creates one phenomenal application. Pictures can be previewed within the feed and searching Twitter can be launched from within the application. Mind you, this all seamless. Feeds are counted with replies and Growl provides constant updates.

The Advanced

Kiwi offers plenty of customization through its various themes, but the rest of what makes this app great is hidden. The use of rules (like in Mail and other applications) is something that can make sorting through Twitter updates go much easier. In addition, the expansion allowed under the rules portion goes beyond just the basic sorting, allowing for colors and other flagging and hiding tools to be implemented. Kiwi also supports Tumlbr accounts and the use of groups and Twitter search options. Sure, Kiwi uses a tad bit more memory then Tweetie, but it supports customization, notifications (including Growl) and so much more.

Overall

The use of Twitter is such a subjective manner. Those that prefer Tweetdeck, like us, probably use it because of its windowed feature that makes multiple accounts much easier to handle. While Kiwi supports multiple accounts, the view that Tweetdeck offers makes this not so much of a competition. We find to be a competitor of the dominant Tweetie. And in all honesty, it’s no competition. Using Tweetie after Kiwi feels like you have Kiwi Lite, except Tweetie costs twice as much. Kiwi is available directly from YourHead for $9.95.