Twitter for Mac updates after a quiet year

After a year of stagnation, Twitter has announced an update for its Twitter for Mac client. The news, published on the company’s blog, highlights several new features supported by Twitter for Mac, including easier photo sharing, enhanced visuals for MacBooks with Retina displays, and support for an additional 14 languages.

The streamlined photo sharing feature will likely be a welcome sight for Twitter for Mac users. Instead of having to drag and drop an imagine onto the top of your ‘compose tweet’ box (which is kind of a pain), there is a camera icon under the box that can be clicked. You can then browse your storage drive for the photo you want to share.

Retina visuals are a big plus. The Twitter for Mac client will just look nicer after the update. The app and all of the content that shows up in it will be more crisp and able to show more detail. Considering the first Retina MacBook Pro came out nearly a year ago, though, Retina support is something that probably should have been addressed in a small update months ago.

And, really, is there anything bad you can say about an app supporting more languages? Twitter for Mac will offer support for tweeters in 14 more languages. Those languages, according to Twitter, are “Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish.” Hallo to our Dutch friends and merhaba to our Turkish readers.

Does anyone remember when the official Twitter apps for Mac and iOS were called Tweetie, and were developed by a guy named Loren Brichter? Those were good times. The Tweetie apps were best-in-class clients for Twitter, which is why the company was quick to snatch them up when it decided it needed “official” apps. Twitter for iOS has been treated fairly well — except for the iPad version, which used to be great and is now so-so — but Twitter for Mac hasn’t been shown a whole lot of love over the past year or two.

Hopefully this update is a sign of things to come. People are just as passionate about their desktop Twitter clients as they are their mobile clients. If Twitter is going to tell developers they shouldn’t make clients, the company has a responsibility to not only keep its own clients updated (a year for Retina support? really?), but to make them the best clients available, period.

We’ll have to wait and see if that happens. In the meantime, you can grab the Twitter for Mac update from the Mac App Store right now.