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.

I know, the iPod touch isn’t as cool as the iPhone which by now, most people own and are busy twittering about how cool they are and making up romantic stories about how they saved their lives and cured their impotence and made food taste better, but I still adore my iPod, especially now that the 2.0 software upgrade has become available. It’s like a whole new device.

Let’s revisit my original wishlist for a second:

1. iTunes connectivity — not quite, but the Remote application is pretty close. It lets you control a running iTunes from your wifi network. This is especially excellent if you have an Airport Express in another room and you don’t want to run back to your computer to skip a tune. Navigation is excellent. I just wish I could select a remote speaker set from this app to send my music to whichever set of speakers I’m next to. A minor quibble.
2. Internet Radio — last.fm and, apparently pandora.com have apps available. Sadly, due to copyright restrictions(?) pandora.com won’t let me use their service here. In any case, I spent dinner listening to last.fm hooked up to my portable speakers in the dining room, enjoying some recommended tunes over the wifi. The ribs and corn were extra delicious as a result.
3. Podcasts — haven’t found an answer to this yet, though there’s no reason they couldn’t add these to the iTMS on the iPod. It probably hasn’t been done because they don’t want the bother of managing subscriptions on their end. I bet we’ll see some podcast-specific apps soon enough. TEDtalks anyone?
4. Airtunes — not really, though the Remote app in #1 comes damned close. It’d still be nice to listen to iTunes content on my iPod remotely though. I’ll give them half a point.
5. TV Shows — also no. But with the latest Apple TV updates it can only be a matter of time before we start getting video content through the iTMS on our iPods (and, I suppose, iPhones).

Really, 2.5 / 5 isn’t bad for 5 months. It gives me hope for the other 2.5 points to arrive in time for xmas! Keep up the great work Apple!

PS, screw you Rogers.

listening to Static: Terrible Canyons of Static; Chart #3; World Police and Friendly by Godspeed You Black Emperor! from the album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven