While browsing through Tweetbot related tweets, I came across The Only Negative Review of Tweetbot You’ll Read On the Internet. It’s biased to what I’m going to call utilitarian clients (Echofon, Twitter for iPhone, etc.), but well-written. The author, Amber Nettles Eric Fadden, argues that while Tweetbot is beautiful in presentation, it lacks “core functionality”.
But developers must not lose sight of functionality. A Ferrari that lacks an engine is, for all intents and purposes, useless. The same goes for applications.
For the record, Tweetbot isn’t engineless. That’s a stupid analogy; a straw man argument. But the reality is, Tweetbot isn’t for everybody. Even I found myself on the fence when deciding whether I’d use it full-time after it was released. (Like many others, I’d set off to find a viable Twitter for iPhone replacement after the Quickbar, and had found Tweetlogix, which has just about every feature and function you could ask for in a Twitter client, but still maintained a semblance of great UX – something most of the other utilitarian apps lack.)
Ultimately, Tweetbot became my Twitter client of choice for three primary reasons: (1) it provides every core function of the Twitter service, (2) it provides additional functions that I like, and (3) it’s a joy to use.