Long-awaited redesign of Tweetbot for Mac teased by Tapbots

The OS X Yosemite redesign of Tweetbot for Mac, which recently pulled a disappearing act on the Mac App Store, is on track for release later this year.

The long-awaited update to the $19.99 Mac edition of the popular Tweetbot third-party Twitter client for iOS has just been teased by its developer, Tapbots. The upcoming version of the Mac app is shown in a photo tweeted by Tapbots designer Mark Jardine and accompanied by the caption, “Full Speed Ahead. 2015 is going to be great.”

As you can see below, the photo is not focused on the app itself, making it appear blurry, as befits a teaser image. But it’s not too blurry to obscure the realization that the Tweetbot app in the image is largely a reskinned version of the app’s current interface.

Unsurprisingly, the upcoming update includes simpler and flatter UI elements including rounded avatars and fine glyphs like those found in Tweetbot for iPhone. Of course, this is in line with the visual style of OS X Yosemite, which was released in October last year.

Also shown in the photo is an iPhone app that appears to be a redesigned version of Tapbot’s calculator app for iOS, Calcbot, whose Mac edition was released just three months ago.

“If you squint really hard …”

Notably absent in the teaser, though, is the long-overdue redesign of Tweetbot for iPad. Unlike Tweetbot for iPhone, which was revamped for iOS 7 shortly after the release of the operating system update in 2013, Tweetbot for iPad is yet to be overhauled as expected.

Following the release of iOS 8 in September last year, Tapbots confirmed that it had been working on the anticipated update to the iPad app. But it said that development had been slower than expected for Tweetbot for iPad since it had also been busy working on updates for its other apps, including the unit conversion app Convertbot, the copy-paste app Pastebot, and the weight-tracking app Weightbot.

At any rate, as a longtime user of Tapbots’ apps both on Mac and iOS, I’m glad that at least the OS X Yosemite update to Tweetbot for Mac and presumably the iOS 8 update to Calcbot are coming out later this year.