{13bold}, a collaborative software effort between Matt Patenaude and Laurent Baumann already had one hit application with Bowtie, a skinnable iTunes controller, and now they are looking to sweeten the deal by breaking into yet another saturated market: Twitter Clients. Their new app, named “Bluebird” has one important feature that no other client has implemented (well) — XHTML/CSS Skinning. In this post I will be reviewing all of Bluebird’s features, and will give the world it’s first peek at this application.

Bluebird

Public View:
Bluebird’s public view is fairly simple, basically showing all your tweets that are visible to your followers (everything but direct messages). This view allows filtering of your tweets. You can view only your tweets, your replies, your favorite tweets, or your friends’ tweets. If filtering isn’t enough for you, you can also search through your tweets using the search box at the top right of the window. Replying to other tweets is also very easy, you simply click on the tweeter’s avatar, and @username is inserted into the post box. Like most other clients, Bluebird also has a “characters remaining” indicator that is helpful when writing posts. Also Bluebird features a “requests remaining” indicator in the lower left hand corner. The is basically a limit on how many API calls you can make to twitter’s servers. I’m not sure that this is going to be important to most users, but it does provide  some more information to power users.

Bluebird's Public View

Private View:
Direct messages are handled differently in Bluebird than they are in many other clients. There is a separate view only for your direct messages. This view also groups all your direct messages by sender, with an indicator for how many messages you have. Similar to replying, direct messaging somebody is done by clicking on the user’s avatar. I’m not quite sure what additional functionality having a separate view provides, however it is different from most clients out there.

Bluebird's Private View

Skinning System:
One very unique feature of Bluebird, is it’s ability to be skinned using XHTML and CSS. While there are no docs available because it is still in beta, I would imagine that skinning Bluebird is very similar to skinning Bowtie. The only skin that is available now is the default one designed by Laurent Baumann. However I would expect that to change as soon as the public beta becomes available.

What a Bluebird Skin Consists Of

Multiple Account Support:
Bluebird supports multiple twitter accounts at the same time. This is nice for developers and others who create twitter accounts for products they are launching. Switching views is done with a dropdown in the title bar.

Bluebird's Multiple Account Support

Overall Impression:
Bluebird has an incredible amount of potential. Right now it is in pre-beta, and I would not use it on a daily basis. However I have faith that by the time public release rolls around it will be ready to rock my twitter account. The skinning feature is extremely important to this application’s success. I’m sure the MacThemes.net community  will have plenty of themes out for us to use within a few days of Bluebird being released. While the version of Bluebird I have now is not ready to replace Twitterific, I am sure that by its public release (It is at 0.70, once it reaches 1.0 it will be publicly released) it will be more than ready to replace any other twitter client. Bluebird is a very well thought out application, and I would defenitely recommend keeping an eye on Matt and Laurent’s twitter feed, and its website. Kudos to {13bold} for yet another wonderful piece of software!