Tweetbot, a popular third-party Twitter client for Apple’s mobile devices, is now available for Mac as a public alpha in order to get feedback from users and move as quickly as possible towards a finished product.
As an alpha release, users are warned that the Mac app will contain lots of bugs that will need to be reported and fixed, and performance issues should be expected.
While feedback and crash reports will be welcomed by the Tweetbot team (and required to further development), their time will be dedicated to completing the app, so support and responses to user issues will be at a bare minimum.
While the core features of the iOS service have been replicated, some features have been left out, and Notification Centre and iCloud won’t be supported until the product sees its official release through the Mac App Store.
Also, the graphics aren’t final so users may spot some things of place, but the developers are working towards a pixel-perfect and Retina-ready version on completion.
Updates will be pushed out regularly to fix bugs and add new functionality, and these will have to be installed each time as old versions will expire after a certain period of time.
All-in-all, anyone that installs the new Tweetbot for Mac does so at their own risk. Benevolent users may wish to assist in the development of the service for Mac, while others may simply want the opportunity to install and try out the app for free.
Once version 1.0 is complete, the app will be on sale in the Mac App Store for a fee.
The alpha release will support OS 10.7 and upwards, but the full release will only support OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or later.
Tweetbot image via Mark Jardine on Dribbble
