Who doesn’t love applications that are designed with pixel-perfect care and a bit of fun? Tapbots has mastered this great combination, and yesterday they released an alpha version of the long-awaited Tweetbot for Mac. From their blog post:

Tweetbot for Mac is finally available! However it may not be quite as you had hoped. Developing for the Mac is no easy task, especially a full-featured Twitter client. However, we’ve gotten to a point where while not complete, it is useable. We’ve decided to release it as a public alpha to a) motivate us to finish faster, and b) get feedback to help us build the best Mac incarnation of Tweetbot we can make. You can love it or hate it, but rest assured it will only get much better from here.

I’ve been using the app for a few hours now, and here are my initial thoughts.

Design

If you’ve used Tweetbot for iPhone or iPad, you’ll feel right at home in the Mac version. It has a beautiful, unique interface which features rounded corners and subtle highlights on UI elements. The tweets themselves feature rich inline previews of images, videos, and apps, but the type looks slightly pixellated.

Compared to the default Twitter client on the Mac, Tweetbot has a premium look and feel. From the custom window chrome, to the robo-egg app icon (the app hasn’t ‘hatched’ yet), you can plainly see that Mark Jardine (the designer) has put in hours of work to perfect the interface.

Functionality

Tweetbot for Mac includes many of the great features that made me switch to it on iOS. Inline image previews, streaming, muting, and of course, multiple accounts are all present. When composing a tweet, a small popup appears, which can be undocked from the Tweetbot window. You can add your location or an image to a tweet, in a way similar to Twitter for Mac.

Navigating through the app is simple and quick, and there are some thoughtful two-finger swipe gestures present which reflect the gestures on iOS. I didn’t notice any performance issues or glitches when running the app, which is a good sign.

Conclusion

This alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac looks promising. There are a few rough edges which can be polished, but the core functionality we all know and love from Tapbots is inside that shell, just waiting to be unleashed into the wilds of the Mac App Store. What are you waiting for? Get the Tweetbot for Mac public alpha now. It’s free.