Snitter: Snook’s Twitter

Twitter, the micro-blogging service, has really taken off since its inception in July of 2006. Users can tell the world what they’re up to at every moment of their day via text messaging, Twitter’s web interface, or through desktop clients. Given that most Twitter users are in fact geeks (readers, be proud!) and spend most of their time at their computers, desktop clients are the most popular. For us Mac users, Twitterific, from IconFactory, has long dominated this market.

Enter Snitter. Snitter, which stands for (the developer, Jonathan) Snook’s Twitter, runs on Adobe’s AIR platform meaning it can run on Windows and Mac OS X. Snitter covers all the main features that you would want in a Twitter application; the ability to reply, direct message, favorite, and of course, tweet.

However, where Snitter excels over Twitterific is in its wealth of additional features. You can see a good chunk of:

• An archive of your old tweets
• Tweets in response to you
• The Twitter public timeline
• Your favorite tweets
• Direct Messages to you

Another neat feature in Snitter is search. First, you can quickly and easily search through all your friends and followers; a convenient feature if you want to quickly find someone’s profile, a shortened version of which you can see right in the Snitter window. However, the main attraction is that you can search through any tweet both in your friends’ and public timeline. This is a feature not (to my knowledge) even available in the Twitter web interface.

Snitter also has the option of being skinned with a handful of skins included in the app’s options pane. Users can even customize the skin to match their own tastes.

Overall, Snitter doesn’t have any glaring omissions or flaws that drag it down and is the best Twitter client available for either Mac or PC.

You’ll need Adobe’s AIR to download Snitter, which is free.