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Exactly one month ago, I decided to stop using web clients and start using desktop clients for some frequent tasks. What did I find?  I like theweb clients better. For most of the apps I tried, I lasted about a day or two.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe I have pre-conditioned myself to automatically open the browser over the last 15 years. In some cases, I simply preferred the web version. These are all great apps though, here’s the break down:

• Postbox is a great app, but I just prefer gmail. The web user interface is about as good as I could wish for.
• NetNewsWire was the same as above, google reader (with the help of ByLine on my iPhone) is what I prefer.
• Tweetie is the one case where I did use the desktop application. Tweetie has a better user experience than twitter itself.
• MarsEdit was a long shot anyway, I mean, this is the first post since a month ago, I just haven’t blogged enough to even remember it exists.

So there it is. I’m a web-based junkie.

Between Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, and now, google voice, I spend 99% of my time in the google domain. So I guess I’ll try some desktop software for awhile and see how it goes. I’ve decided (apparently just now) that I will do this for a month. The choices?

Monday is here and as promised, atebits has released Tweetie for Mac. Having spent the $2.99 for the iPhone version I had high hopes for the Mac version. With a couple exceptions, it is great!

I’ve been a Twhirl user for some time, it ended up being the better of many, many twitter clients. I think I may switch, however to Tweetie for one feature alone: Conversation view. Being able to click on a conversation I have no context for and seeing what is going on makes so much sense, I’m suprised it hasn’t happened before. (It may have, I just haven’t looked)

The worst part, no opacity option. While this seems simple enough to ignore, It helped in the focus department. Set the opacity to 20% when not active and you don’t see the thousands of tweets streaming by every second.

Sacrifice! I’ll have to sacrifice opacity for a better, in my opinion, UI. Good UI makes me happy.