Tweetie for Mac and iPad Still in the Works

Ars Technica spoke with Tweetie developer Loren Brichter this week at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference and received a status update on his plans for Mac and iPad development. Brichter had promised a beta version of Tweetie 2 for Mac for late March, with purchasers of MacHeist's nanoBundle set to receive access to it, but the release is still nowhere to be seen.

The reason for the delay is that Brichter has been a bit preoccupied in recent months with Twitter's acquisition and rebranding of Tweetie for iPhone for use as the company's official iPhone client. The delays and focus shift for Tweetie have led many fans of the Mac version to wonder if development has been abandoned, but Brichter promises that he's getting back to work on the project.

Although Tweetie 2.0 for Mac has been put off for a while thanks to the acquisition and the re-release of Tweetie for iPhone (now known as Twitter for iPhone), Brichter says he'll be back to working on Tweetie for Mac within weeks.

He also promises that development on Tweetie for Mac will continue through at least version 3, suggesting that he already has ideas about future feature implementations for the platform.

Brichter is also looking to bring Tweetie to the iPad platform in native form, a space where other iPhone applications have already been establishing themselves.

As many iPad users know, Tweetie/Twitter has yet to arrive on the iPad in native resolution, but Brichter says it's coming soon and, in fact, it's so great that he wishes he could share some of the iPad code back to the Mac. "The goal is to exceed the Twitter iPhone app in the iPad," he said.

Early this week, Tweetie for Mac was named a winner in Ars Technica's Ars Design Awards for Mac OS X applications in the "Best Mac OS X User Experience" category. The awards were created by Ars Technica this year in order to fill the vacuum left behind by Apple's elimination of Mac OS X categories from its own Apple Design Awards.