Airmailr Review: Twitter On Your Dashboard

Imagine having the power of Twitter right there in your dashboard.  Tweet your latest status, direct message people, check your friends timeline, and even search Twitter – without opening an app.  This is exactly what Airmailr brings to the table.

Think of Airmailr as your gateway to all of Twitter’s services without using your web browser.  Though there are many apps that already syndicate your timeline and publish you latest tweets, Airmailr does this in using Apple’s quick-at-a-glance feature – Dashboard.  Dashboard was designed to show you information any time you want to see it.  This is exactly what Airmailr does with your Twitter timeline.

When first installing Airmailr, a built in setup system takes you through a couple easy steps to get itself up and running.  You first have to allow Twitter to communicate with Airmailr.  Clicking on the given link in the setup takes you to Twitter’s “allow -this app- to communicate with Twitter” page.

Type in your account username and password and hit “allow”.  Continue the setup process by going back to the widget in Dashboard.

Airmailr’s interface resembles that of other Twitter clients with the standard up-and-down visual timeline along with a small thumbnail provided by the Twitter user.  Hovering over a Tweet in the timeline darkens its background.  A quick RT or “Re-Tweet” button in the bottom right-hand corner of each hovered tweet allows you to forward this tweet to your timeline allowing all of your friends to see the same message.  Clicking on someone’s screen name allows you to view a page of specs including their profile information as well as how many tweets they have posted.  Quick links are also provided in this spec page that allow you to quickly see their latest tweets and go to their profile and specified web page.

Navigation tabs at the top of the widget take you to different features.  ”Friends” takes you the timeline of just your friended twitterers.  ”@Replies” filters down to all of the tweets that were publicly directed towards you.  ”DM” which stands for “Direct Message”, filters down to all of the tweets that were privately directed towards you.  ”Search” allows you search the entire “Twitterverse” with a search box.

The bottom toolbar has four items.  ”Prefs” takes you to the widget’s preference pane.  Here you can adjust settings such as how often Airmailr checks for new tweets, how you want Airmailr to interact and use “Growl”, and how many tweets you want to see in your timeline at a time. “Logout” does exactly what it says – logs you out of Twitter.  ”Refresh Symbol” tells Airmailr to refresh and look for new tweets.  The right-hand icon that resembles a speech bubble allows you to post a new tweet.  You can also enter in a shortened URL so that the URL itself doesn’t take up the entire tweet message.

All in all, Airmailr is a great Twitter client even though it is still in its BETA form.  Using the speed and accessibility of Dashboard, Airmailr preforms without a hiccup and with great speed.  Getting and sending tweets takes seconds, and with it’s built in growl support, you don’t even need to open Dashboard to have your tweets automatically popup.  For those of you who are looking for a lightweight twitter client who also uses Dashboard a lot, this is the widget for you.

Airmailr is free and available at airmailr.com.

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