Those following me on Twitter (hey, why aren’t you?) might have noticed an upswing in my Twitter usage lately. For the most part, this can be attributed to Mixero, a fairly new Twitter client. I hear you thinking the world isn’t big enough for yet another Twitter client, but this one has a few options that you might want to try out.
Flexible and intuitive group and context management are just the starters.
For me the most important feature is the way
Mixero arranges Twitter contacts. The principle element is the “active list”. People or groups can be added to this list which is central in the interface. From there you can quickly access the tweets of the list or tweets from specific people/groups in your active lists.
Using contexts, you can manage multiple active lists and quickly switch between those. The concept has been thought through to the end, which results in a very usable and intuitive program. Even searches are integrated into the active list.
If you’re a procrastinator and want to be distracted all the time, Mixero has an “avatars mode” which reduces the interface to the avatar images overlaid on top of your other programs. It looks good and looks useful, but it’s way too distracting for me, I can’t get any work done with this mode turned on.
A few things that would improve this already great program:
- Keyboard shortcuts. Any program can benefit from well thought out keyboard shortcuts.
- A possibility to mark individual tweets as read. I understand you’re supposed to work with “lists” as a work unit, but from time to time I like to open up my “master” list and just scroll through it. It would be nice if I can mark the messages I read.
- Maybe it already exists, but locking an active context would be nice. Now if you click on a contact, it’s automatically added to your active list. This is both good and bad, so a way to lock the list might only leave the good stuff.
Mixero also has an iPhone client, which I haven’t tried yet, but it too looks just as user friendly. And important, it synchronizes states between the desktop and mobile client.
There you have it, my new favorite Twitter client.