MacHeist

A waste of money!?!? You're paying at least $30/month for your iPhone and your pissed cause you spent a total of $6 (one time fee, I might add) to support an independent developer (or at least he was at the time)? This kind of attitude is rediculous. I paid for Tweetie 1, I paid for Tweetie 2 happily even though there was no "upgrade price" and I'd pay for whatever twitter iteration of tweetie comes up next. Imo, $3 for an app is a steal, especially when your supporting a one man team, who is independent of any other company (once again, until now). If you can't handle paying $3 dollars for something, than don't buy it. There are plenty of free apps you could have chosen (twitterific to name one) that may have fulfilled your needs.

Now that my rant is done, my 2 cents on the "buy-out"

I'm happy for Loren. He's been doing great programming and design for a while now and I'm happy to seem him get a break like this. That said, I think that he'll have a lot of work to do in the coming months in order to make Twitter for the iPhone (the new name of Tweetie) a competitor in a rapidly growing market of beautiful twitter apps. With Twiba and Chalk coming soon, and Twitterific already having a large name for itself, the twitter team has their work cut out for them. This also goes the other way, though. Twitter for iPhone (from now on referred to as TfiP) will have new twitter features before anybody else, which means the other apps will have to stay on their toes. It also means that since TfiP will be getting much more recognition as the "official" twitter app competitors will need to make sure that they are able to innovate and design in new and interesting ways in order to keep the attention of the masses.
All and all, these are interesting times, not just for twitter and atebits, but for the internet as a whole. As more and more computing is done on a mobile platform, I think we'll start to see a lot of mobile designers and programmers getting snapped up by big names.

In other news, Louie Mantia got hired by Apple today (or at least he officially announced it today)...

-Z

Last edited by tempored (April 10, 2010 5:54 am)

I haven't seen any lack of morals or integrity? What lies? Look, You've got a right to be angry, and you've got a right to spend your money on whatever you want. Everything that I post here is my opinion, but I do feel that throwing around accusations like that without evidence is pretty ridiculous...

Well when it comes to the iPhone app I'm not upset - we have got what we are promised. Okay it was set free after but that's life. I bought a camera and it was on sale 2 days after ... (Edit Yes, I was also a bit upset at the time as I could have used that money for better things but calm down very soon)

It's something different with the mac app. We have bought an app in a bundle where we also was promised to get an beta very soon. We have not got this. I don't want to call it something yet as I hope we get an statement here very soon. We are nearly 90 000 who have bought it and I think we have a right to get to know.

Last edited by macwitty (April 10, 2010 6:45 am)

atebits wrote:

Hey all - first of all I apologize for any confusion, things have been a bit crazy!  I just want to says I'm blasting through the todo list to get a beta put together as fast as I can, the Mac UI stuff I've been prototyping is just too cool to have anything else happen to it.  Sorry for keeping it short, gotta get back to coding!

Thanks for keeping us posted, Loren, and congrats on the acquisition! We're all looking forward to Tweetie 2 for Mac.

The same cryptic lead us all on style as usual. Ok I've given this way too much of my time. Whatever will be will be the saying goes......

twitter just did the right thing: acquiring the best and making it a free app!

bostonguy3737 wrote:

The same cryptic lead us all on style as usual. Ok I've given this way too much of my time. Whatever will be will be the saying goes......

Didn't sound cryptic to me. Sounds like he's saying the 2.0 Mac version is still ongoing.

Like many MacHeisters, I was a little frustrated by the Tweetie announcement -- surely this acquisition must have been in train at the point when early access to the 2.0 beta was included in the nanobundle, and equally surely Tweetie will become free when it's the Twitter official app.

Having said that, I do wish Loren and atebits all the best. While part of me grieves that we won't see more lovely apps like Tweetie and Scribbles, I'm glad that Twitter's got such a fantastic coder.

The argument "But it's not fair!" didn't work when you were a screaming toddler and it holds just as much weight now.

No lies have been told (I don't remember seeing "buy Tweetie it'll never reduce in cost or be given away for free"), you were not scammed out of money (you got a great app for the money you paid that you couldn't get anywhere else cheaper *at that time*) and you were not forced to buy it (you had plenty of other apps to choose from that cost less or nothing at all).

This acquisition amounts to someone being recognized for their talent and hard work. It will spark similar leaps in innovative design and functionality as others seek to compete, and it looks like you won't have to pay for Tweetie again even if you did want to carry on using it. I fail to see an issue here.

So go gather up your toys and play nice.

You guys know that Tweetie for iPhone is becoming Twitter's official app?
Tweetie for Mac remains safe since twitter already has twitter.com anyway.

Personally I think that those of us who bought it within the last month or two are due a refund. No doubt that the developer is making a small mint from Google.

Thanks this make my night congratulations!