Hi, Twitter.
I know we fight a lot. You know I report a lot of abuse and harassment, and you do nothing about the Nazis, and we have our differences. But this isn’t about that. I mean, yeah, I’m salty about the Russian thing, but we need to talk about something else.
We need to talk about using Twitter on a desktop when you have multiple accounts.
Multiple Twitter Accounts Happen
I have a legit reason to have multiple accounts. A good one, in fact. I have my personal account, but I have two others for brands I manage. And that means I kind of need to be able to log in to all three at once and wrangle things.
If you use Twitter on the web, your choices are regular Twitter or Tweetdeck. The latter makes you sign up via a very convoluted process in order to grant access to accounts. Basically, you have to give your ‘main’ account access to the ones you want to manage. It’s not very obvious.
And there are weird things missing from Tweetdeck. Like … no decent notifications. You can’t tell what you’ve read or when people @ you or anything like that. Not easily. Oh, and there’s no GIF button.
Finally … with three accounts I get to have NINE columns. Three each for ‘home,’ ‘mentions,’ and ‘messages.’ Thanks. A lot.
No Great Desktop App
Here’s my problem. There’s no good Twitter desktop app. Your own app went unloved until you pulled the plug. In a tweet. Nice. Really nice. That leaves me with a few choices.
TweetBot: I like Tweetbot, except that I can’t see polls in it, and I can’t navigate to embed Gifs. But it has a pretty decent interface. The biggest issue is that you can’t see group DMs. Sometimes keep on top breaks. Sometimes not.
Twitterific: This is a wonderful app except that scrolling sucks. If you switch to a different account, keep on top stops working, and ⌘↑ (which should take you to the top of whatever you’re on) doesn’t scroll right. Oh and no embedding Gifs. And again, no group DMs and no polls.
What about TweetDeck’s desktop app? It hasn’t been updated since 2015. The best version I’ve seen is Tweeten but again, I’m back to 3 columns per account.
What I Want Is Simple
I want the iOS app, but for the desktop. I want to have the following features:
- Multiple Account Support
- One visual ‘column’ per account (it can have sub tabs, whatever)
- The ability to insert and read polls
- Support for multi-person DMs
- Notifications
- A damn GIF button
Instead, I get to use Tweetdeck in my browser. At least, until Twitter dumps that too.
