The Breakroom

Twitterrific for Mac: Project Phoenix

February 14, 2017

By Sean Heber

Ollie as a burning Phoenix with the Project Phoenix logo

We’ve been missing Twitterrific on our Macs for a long time and we know we’re not alone. Today we’re announcing a plan to bring it back: Project Phoenix.

After much consideration, we decided that the best way forward was to go back to the beginning. Rather than bending the long-neglected Twitterrific for Mac into a new shape, we will borrow what we can from iOS and use it to build a modern new macOS app.

To achieve such a large undertaking in a reasonable timeframe, we’ll start small: Our goal is to deliver a minimal Twitter client much like the original Twitterrific for Mac, but with a feature set that fits how we use Twitter in 2017 instead of how we thought we wanted to use it back in 2007.

We’re confident that we can do this, but we need your help! Please check out our Kickstarter page, watch the video and study the plan. There are many different funding levels including regular access to beta builds all through Phoenix’s lifespan. If you’re the kind of person who loves to see software evolve through it’s development, or just want to start using a new Twitterrific on your desktop sooner rather than later, this one is for you.

This is our first Kickstarter project and a new way for us to fund our software development. The main reason the Mac app languished is because we aren’t sure that there’s a market for a desktop social networking product (it’s easy to make a case that all our social activities have moved to mobile.) For our small software company, the risk of recouping development costs was just too high. Kickstarter removes this unpredictability and gives us an exact budget to work against.

Together, we can make a new Twitterrific for Mac a reality. Make a pledge, and with luck, we can get started soon!