Tweetie Meet Beak, Your New Competition

It wasn’t too long ago that Tweetie made headlines on various tech news sites including TechCrunch and Digg with the release of Tweetie For Mac after much success on the iPhone.  However, it appears Tweetie is going to be up against some competition quite soon.  The new twitter client exclusively for Mac is called Beak.  Beak is currently in a public beta and looks very promising.  The design and user interface are very nice and it has a great feel (see screen shot below).

Beak offers all of the basics such as replies, retweeting, favoriting, mentions, direct messages, URL shortening, and search.  In addition to the basics it offers URL statistics which allows you to see stats about the links you share through Twitter.  What I really love about Beak is the way it handles replies.  Beak provides an in-line (threaded) view which makes it extremely easy to keep track of and follow conversations between people.

There are a couple things Beak does not do (at least not yet) that Tweetie For Mac does which I would love to see in Beak.  I would like to see Beak display the landing page for all shortened links before opening them (or at least provide an option to do that) so I know where I’m actually going when I click a tinyurl, bit.ly, is.gd, or any one of those links.  The other feature I would like to see in Beak is to have Beak display all TwitPic’s without having to go to the site itself.  I would also like to see Beak offer the option to set your own refresh time.

Please remember Beak is still in beta and that any bugs should be reported to the developer (mike [at] beakapp.com).  Let me know what you think about Beak, leave a comment!