
Twitter Killing Its Mac App - ttepasse
https://512pixels.net/2018/02/twitter-killing-its-mac-app/
======
fishtoaster
It seems like this has been a while coming. The Mac app still hadn't been
updated to support 280 characters when I finally ditched it a couple weeks ago
(in favor of Tweetbot). If they couldn't push out a change like that in 3
months, the app has probably not been maintained for quite a while.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
I also ditched a few weeks ago for Tweetbot. The official Twitter app still
uses square avatars and, the real killer bug, no longer supports pictures.
pic.twitter.com links just send you to the tweet recursively.

------
kmfrk
As a latecomer to macOS, Tweetie feels like a bygone era back when the default
didn't seem to be Electron and web views.

I want to believe in online apps, but god, they all just suck so much, if not
at launch, then a few years down the line.

~~~
oldmancoyote
Given the sociopathic aspects of Twitter, maybe this is a good time to kiss it
off. Maybe this is just the nudge we need.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Yes, Twitter as a campaign/marketing vehicle pretty much enabled the outcome
of our last Presidential election.

------
5_minutes
Also strange: on the iOS app, you can add multiple accounts. On the web
version not.

Tweetdeck doesnt feel snappy at all.

Twitter is, very broken - for a very long time now.

~~~
khc
I use Firefox container tabs to get around this

~~~
deecewan
It's this built in to Firefox? I use session box in Chrome for a similar
effect.

~~~
smnrchrds
Container API is built into Firefox, but for now you need to install a Mozilla
add-on to actually use the feature:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-
containers/)

------
rocky1138
Can we channel all the anger and frustration this has caused into switching to
Mastodon/GNU Social?

Open standards, run your own if you want, nobody deprecating or discontinuing
anything.

~~~
lokedhs
I tried Twitter a long time ago, and never enjoyed it.

I've been quite active on Mastodon (@loke@functional.cafe) for the last
several months, and enjoying it a lot.

It's not perfect, but it gives me more satisfaction than Twitter ever could.

The biggest problem with Mastodon at the moment is discoverability. It takes
some effort finding the right people to follow but I've found a reasonable
group of people who are interested in things like Emacs, Lisp etc.

~~~
skinnymuch
I am really interested in how you found people too.

~~~
lokedhs
I joined an instance which focuses on the things I'm interested in, and look
at the local timeline. That timeline contains original posts (i.e. not
replies) posted from that instance. I'd follow pretty much anyone posting
anything remotely interesting.

A lot of people tend to boost interesting posts, and following people whose
posts gets boosted allows you to grow your follow list with interesting posts.

Unfollowing people that keeps posting uninteresting things is also important
of course.

~~~
skinnymuch
Can you mention your instance or how you went about finding it? Sorry for more
questions

------
jhack
So, alternatives? I have Twitter on the side next to my browser. Using Twitter
in a separate window doesn't work because Twitter for the web isn't mobile
friendly and mobile.twitter.com doesn't refresh if the window isn't in focus.

~~~
amedvednikov
I'm working on a desktop client for Twitter, FB, Slack etc.

It's pretty snappy and weighs only 90 KB (!)

[https://eul.im](https://eul.im)

Twitter support is coming later this month.

~~~
asantos3
I'm calling bullshit on you, your shenanigans and all of the blind idiots.

1\. I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download
till tomorrow. Why...

2\. You have no github and hn history besides spamming the shit of eul and I
can't trust no proprietary third party shit.

4\. Do you really think you can open source something that could bite your ass
legally (whatsapp)? Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or
what? If so say it instead of "ye ye I will open source it".

5\. Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much
shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past
versions downloaded a GB?

~~~
owenversteeg
Ok, I'll bite.

After checking out the guy and his project, it seems like he's really truly
passionate about making minimal, fast software. I love it: I do a similar
thing myself (I made the smallest, fastest CSS framework.) I can tell it in
his comments and the effort he's put into this. It's a totally unique project,
and as far as I can google, it's the only one of its kind. In a world of
massive, bloated apps that eat gigs of RAM for breakfast it's a refreshing
change.

The audience for something this minimal is fairly niche, and HN probably has
the densest concentration of people for it. He's been mentioning it not very
often, and only when it's relevant, which seems fair to me.

He's also clearly a very talented developer and put a ton of work into it. I
have a feeling he'd like to make some money off it. I've been in a similar
position myself, years ago: not sure whether to open-source or not because of
the perpetual doubt in the back of your mind. I don't blame him: he's getting
$11/month off Patreon.

The past versions thing doesn't matter IMO - after checking the Github, he
says they don't work anymore. And the previous versions downloaded _half_ a
gigabyte, apparently now it only downloads a few megabytes. Personally, the
biggest thing that concerns me is the source: I'd have to see the source
before I used it for anything.

Alex, if you'd like to talk about the world of FOSS, fast, minimal software,
open-sourcing, and how to make money, feel free to send me an email - it's in
my profile :)

~~~
pharrington
As far as I can tell from the issues, previous versions of his software loaded
the chat service in question's website in a browser, and then either applied a
custom stylesheet to the webpage or attempted to extract portions of the HTML
content for display.

eul.im literally never was minimal. He can keep saying it's minimal software,
but until he produces something that both consistently works and doesn't
consume orders of magnitude more storage than claimed, his words mean nothing.
Again, current, literal reality is an issues page documenting myriad problems
from crashes, blank screens, mangled displays, absence of advertised features,
and claims of updated versions that _still_ have not arrived.

~~~
owenversteeg
Look, it's an issues page, and it's one-man free software. He's a few days
late with the update for a free piece of software, so what? The dude's earning
$11 a month on Patreon. Give him a damn break.

Not to be grumpy to you, but I'd like to defend him. He's got an extremely
noble goal. Those that "get it" really get it, and those that don't don't. I'm
fed up with using several different shitty closed source apps that take up
gigs of ram at a time, and I've tried to write my own version of what he's
done, and I've failed at it. It's incredibly hard. Particularly because the
companies are locked in a neverending cat and mouse trying to stop apps like
this.

Also, based on everything I've seen off of RAM/CPU usage while running there's
absolutely no way he's using an embedded webpage. I'd be happy to be corrected
here though.

~~~
pharrington
I am quite familiar with one person free software projects. I use quite a few,
and have released one myself. The variety and severity of problems in eul.im
over such a short period of time is aberrant.

He claimed Discord support since 15/09/2017 - two months later, Discord
support still wasn't available. He's been claiming since 28/09/2017 that he'd
submit his app to Homebrew. As of four hours ago, he never said a peep to his
mailing list about progress on the new version.

The app _definitely_ used an embedded browser for authentication. That isn't
speculation. He says the new version is rewritten to be a native app, _as
oppposed to what it was before._ My assertion that the app used the browser
for displaying content _is_ speculation, but it is consistent with both the
previous known behavior and the app's dysfunctions. The cool thing about
software is that you can just examine the software to see what it does; too
bad none of us will ever definitively know what his software did since he is
deliberately hiding the previous versions from new eyes.

His history _at best_ demonstrates incompetence. If the thing he is trying to
do indeed is hard, than he is incompetent at doing a hard thing. One's reach
exceeding his grasp is fine and necessary for personal growth - but in that
case, _do not lie_ and say you are delivering something you cannot deliver. If
you are learning, say as much. Perhaps ask for help, perhaps keep previous
attempts public so they can be analyzed by people trying something similar and
by those with more experience. Perhaps upload your source code for the same
reason. _Do not_ put download links on your homepage that launch a popup
saying there is no download.

~~~
amedvednikov
It was not a native app because I was using OpenGL to render content, not a
browser.

------
artsnail
I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a
business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the
time/resources on maintaining this.

I would guess that the kinds of people who 1. use Macs and 2. decide to
download the app are probably among some of Twitter's more engaged and higher-
income users.

~~~
joejev
Why does it matter if the users are high income? Twitter can still serve ads
to low income users.

~~~
rulum
Ads are there to convert (sell stuff). Low income users buy less stuff. Also
less expensive stuff. Ads catering to high income users tend to budget more
for ads because they can be more lax with cost per user acquisition - their
product has the margin to support it. All this leads to more income for
twitter.

------
AHTERIX5000
I've been using TweetDeck on Mac until it started crashing I guess after High
Sierra update. Scrolling also works in somewhat weird way compared to other
apps. The Twitter web app is a mess, it displays lots of tweets liked by
others that usually is just clickbaity noise, not something I want to see in
my feed even though cat pictures can be funny indeed.

Also notifications used to show actually relevant notifications but nowadays
it just displays retweets and tweets liked by others just like in my main feed
and I haven't found a way to disable that.

~~~
rainbowmverse
I thought they killed the TweetDeck app for all platforms. Mac must have
survived the cut. You can still use it on the web, but I don't know how it
compares to the apps.

------
polutropos
Twitterrific is on sale right now in the Mac App Store for eight bucks. Both
it and Tweetbot are great native Mac Twitter apps and are so much better than
the web interface.

------
thrillgore
Where do I go to add my "this is a dumb decision, Twitter should fix its
botting/fake account problem" take?

~~~
egypturnash
Twitter.

------
radley
Maybe this is a good thing. My current Mac app will remain a "pure" Twitter
app and I won't have to worry about it updating to include promotions,
suggested tweets, and needless features (unless "stop supporting" means
they're shutting off the API).

~~~
Kudos
That is surely what it will come to at some point.

------
sodosopa
I wonder if the Russian money they sucked in during the 2016 elections wasn't
enough to keep the app?

------
startupdiscuss
This allows the following to happen:

1\. If someone can make a better MacOS client, they should do so and charge
for it!

2\. Customers can probably pick up a free client from someone who wants to
play around or pay a little more for a pro client

~~~
drawkbox
Building on twitter is like trusting that any new Google product will be
around in a few years, a huge developer risk.

Twitter killed off third party developers as ruthlessly as Nintendo killed
third parties back in NES days.

~~~
djsumdog
Yea, the whole FalconPro thing still has users angry.

------
itsdrewmiller
The commentary on this is off base - maybe twitter is pulling people off this
project to put them on fake accounts / nazis? Certainly maintaining a mac app
doesn't help there.

~~~
orionblastar
All the fake accounts, Nazis, racists, alright, tea party, and other right-
wingers have boycotted Twitter mostly and went here
[http://gab.ai/](http://gab.ai/) instead.

Those left on Twitter are either bots or puppet/troll accounts.

------
nasredin
Related question.

Suggest a Twitter client that...

is not Electron based

shows tweets horizontally, maximizing number of tweets, minimizing scrolling

hides crap like images and video

shows replies as threads

Windows

Thanks

------
sleepybrett
More moeny for tweetbot

------
drvortex
Because of జ్ఞా ?

~~~
saagarjha
No.

------
hengheng
What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent
spot in the Dock?

~~~
xenadu02
Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform
conventions?

I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react
native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as
a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How
much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?

~~~
msvan
Wasn't the Twitter Mac app just an Electron app?

~~~
djsumdog
I think it was a native app and predated electron by quite a bit.

------
tatersolid
Will everyone on HN just stop complaining when a random _free_ service doesn’t
give you exactly what you want?

You are not Twitter’s customer. You are Twitter’s _product_.

If you don’t like that situation, tune out.

------
arnklint
Finally, show the way Twitter! Open web for the win!

