Twitip

Today Collin Robinson from cjgraphix takes a look at EventBox – an exciting new social network manager client for Mac users that does Twitter…. and a whole lot more.

I’m always looking for a good way to simplify my social media lifestyle. The best way for me to do this has been with desktop apps, and I have plenty of them. The downside to these apps was they were all single site apps. I needed something that would combine multiple sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more into a single app. Someone over at http://www.thecosmicmachine.com/ must have been listening because they delivered in a major way with EventBox.

EventBox combines Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Pownce, RSS and Reddit all in a Leopard friendly interface (that’s right, Mac 10.5 only here folks). Another great thing about EventBox, it’s in very active development. There have been more than a handful of updates from the time I first downloaded it until now, a little more than 2 weeks later.

Twitter:

Breaks down into your friends feed, and then it also has reply and dm views so you never miss a response or dm. They did add a good looking pop up for sending Direct Messages, but they missed the ability to view profiles and follow people. In the last update they did add the ability to retweet though.

Facebook:

So naturally it lets you update your status and view all your friends statuses, but it also integrates your photos and your friends photos. There is even a place for you to upload photos. The thumbnails are a bit on the small side, but there is a full size screen to make up for that. There really isn’t anyway to comment on your friends statuses or photos but EventBox does link straight to the facebook page if you double click.

Flickr:

This is a replica of the facebook photos. You can see your friends photos or your photos. You can upload and few photos full size. Again, no comments.

Pownce:

I don’t use pownce very often now, nor did I ever. My friends on Pownce are few and far between, but EventBox show me the public feed so it has become easier to make friends now on pownce. Besides just viewing feeds, you can update your status. I’m hoping to see the ability to ‘send things to your friends’, like photos, links, events … you know, the stuff Pownce was made for.

Digg:

I’ve been a member of Digg for a long time, but never took the time to visit the site daily. Now all the Digg stories are right there in front of me. I can view either the popular stories or the upcoming stories in any of the eight Digg categories. I can even view comments, but viewing is where it stops. I can’t post a comment, or Digg a story. EventBox again happily links me direct to the story page where I can do both the things I would like to do inside EventBox.

Reddit:

It’s the same as Digg, except it has ten categories instead of eight. I ended up removing the Reddit service from EventBox.

RSS:

We’ve all got our favorite feeds, and EventBox brings them together. There is nothing really extra special about the RSS functionality, but it does let you group feeds into folders. I can’t say I’ve ported over any significant amount of feeds to it as I’m happy with my current RSS reader.

EventBox does let you set some preferences, like how often you want it to update information from all the services. You can set a default, as well as individually for each service. I have mine set to update every hour, except for Twitter, which updates every three minutes. I suggest turning off Growl notifications, which are enabled by default, as having a few dozen notifications come in at once can cover a large portion of the screen. I’ve opted for a bounce of the down icon as the notification, as well as showing me the total number of items from all the services.

Overall, I was willing to spend the $15 to register EventBox. I expect to see some regular updates over the coming weeks and months and hopefully the app will become even more useful that is has already proven to be.