Twittering in Nambu
I’ve seen the awkwardly-named Nambu mentioned a couple of times this past week, initially as an alternative iPhone twitter app, and then as a desktop app for OS X. I usually use TwitterFox and find it pretty reasonable so I haven’t felt too compelled to change. Many people use the popular TweetDeck application which hasn’t really interested me due to the annoyance of having to install Adobe Air and suffer yet another Adobe updater experience. But a native app I will give a shot.
Installation is painless. They’re shipping Nambu as a zip file which you can drop in your Apps folder. Currently FriendFeed and Identi.ca support is disabled adding to the “beta-ey” feel of the app. It may be a little rough around the edges. Some other features seem unfinished. Twitter Groups, for example.
What does work is pretty cool. Nambu presents three different views. A combined view showing a straight-up list of tweets, an Outline view, with a tree on the left showing different types of communications, and a multi-column, browser-like view similar to that of tweetdeck. The People group in Outline view presents a list of thumbnails of profile pictures and hovering over them shows a dark iPhoto-styled palette with additional information about the person.
Another nice feature that should be built into Twitter itself is automatic short-url previews. Hovering over the domain name shows the full link and the link-shortening service in a popup. Nambu provides tr.im and pic.im as integrated options for link-shortening and pictures and calls these part of the “Nambu network”.
Searches show up as a new group in the Outline view or grouped with your friends tweets in the Combined view. A way to hide these would be useful as they can overwhelm your friends pretty easily. They get updated so it’s easy to track specific topics in real-time.
Growl support and badges on the dock icon provide ample notification options.
I don’t think I’m quite ready to replace Twittelator Pro on my iPhone yet, but I’m definitely going to give this a shot on my desktop.
Update: after a day, Nambu’s become inoperative on my laptop. I saw two entries in my Twitter accounts, possibly a result of my MobileMe preferences sync. Deleting my preferences file for Nambu had no effect. Maybe I’ll try it again in a month or so, though, after Neilio’s recommendation yesterday, I may just install Tweetie on Monday.
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