The Mac App Store is full of various Twitter clients, at various prices. Finding a well-priced application full of features can be difficult, and spending money on an app that you don’t like is a waste. Kiwi is a well-priced, feature-packed Twitter client that I have been testing since this morning. Here’s what I’ve found:
Strengths:
- Price. When I bought Kiwi this morning, it cost me $0.99. I figured it wouldn’t be a big loss if I didn’t like it. This is the ad-free version from the Mac App Store. You can download the free, ad-filled version here, along with the paid version, or you can buy it in the App Store like I did.
- Interface. The Kiwi interface is very simple, and easy to navigate. It also has full support for Growl notifications, which alert you every time you are mentioned in a tweet or messaged.
- Aesthetics. Along with a great interface, Kiwi offers 9 themes that all look nice and change the feel just enough to make the application personal. You can also download even more themes than the 9 that come pre-installed.
- Memory usage. One problem I found while reviewing Sparrow is that it consumed more memory than necessary over time. Unlike Sparrow, Kiwi keeps a fairly constant memory usage. After more than an hour of running, Kiwi was using 64 MB of my RAM. Kiwi is lightweight enough that I can leave it running in the background without a problem.
- Support for hashtags and auto-completion of usernames. This may seem trivial, but the official Twitter application doesn’t support auto-completion of usernames at this point, and some other Twitter clients lack support for hashtags.
- Support for multiple accounts. I’m sure most Twitter clients have the support for multiple accounts, but the way Kiwi manages them is different. Kiwi gives each account a tab, and makes it easy to switch from feed to feed.
- Customization. Through Kiwi’s preferences, multiple keyboard shortcuts can be set, along with how Kiwi treats various alerts.
Weaknesses:
- First-time setup. The first time I launched Kiwi, it marked every post in my feed as unread and I had to scroll through them all to get rid of the unread count. It didn’t take long, but I personally found it a little annoying. I found later in the preferences that I could’ve saved myself the hassle by simply changing how tweets are marked. Easy fix: change your preferences first.
Overview:
Kiwi is a great application for its price, and I would have gladly paid $4.99 for it(If I used Twitter more, I would say $9.99). The application is set up well, comes with tons of options, and has support for most anything you can do on Twitter itself. The notifications are great, and the amount of personalization available for a Twitter client is superb. Kiwi is a steal at $0.99, and has much better features than the official Twitter application does. Aside from the hassle during set up, which wasn’t really that bad, I couldn’t find anything to dislike about the application. If you love your Twitter feed, Kiwi is definitely worth a look.
