In Twitter’s new normal, third-party app (the heart and soul of the platform) aren’t free and Tweetbot, which finally arrived on the Mac in October, is no exception. However, long-time fairer platform IM client favorite, Adium, freely soldiers on and gains Growl 2/Notification Center support in the latest release.

A simple fact of life. Whereas Tweetbot 1.0 has been well available for the better part of a month, receiving warm reviews, it’s often best to wait for the first point-update before buying.

Well, Tweetbot 1.0.1 (site) has arrived and comes to market with an important new feature, as well as a number of bug fixes:

• added support for Reading list as a Read Later service (10.8+ only)
• added jk navigation support in timeline
• added ability to disable Streaming in Preferences
• improved keyboard support in people searcher
• fixed an issue where timeline would scroll down to tweets that were already read
• fixed streaming on accounts with > 1500 followers
• fixed many other reported issues and crashers

Get Tweetbot exclusively on the Mac App Store ($19.99). This beloved app got its start in the iOS space and is available for iPhone and iPod touch ($2.99).

Free is beautiful

Instant messaging isn’t as popular as it once was — the times have changed. Nevertheless, Adium 1.5.4 (version history) keeps the open-source IM client goodness flowing with Growl 2/OS X Mountain Lion Notification Center compatibility plus a bunch of mostly under-the-hood changes/fixes:

• Updated the included Growl SDK to 2.0, adding support for Notification Center on 10.8 if Growl is not installed (image below)
• Updated libotr to 3.2.1, fixing a security vulnerability
• Updated libpurple to 2.10.6
• Changed default tab switching shortcuts for new users to Control-Tab/Control-Shift-Tab
• Improved disk usage: limit the tracking of the “last seen” time to contacts who are on your contact list
• Fixed a problem where accepting a group chat invite on Sametime 8.5.1 would crash Adium
• Fixed a problem where accepting a group chat invite on HipChat’s XMPP server would crash Adium
• Fixed a problem preventing Adium from executing Applescripts when Gatekeeper is enabled
• Added routines to make Secure Transport (on 10.8 and above) work around buggy TLS implementations in certain older XMPP servers
• Updated translations: British English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portuguese (Portugal), Slovakian, Turkish

So, even if you don’t have Growl 2 installed (recommended), Adium will still provides updates via Notification Center — brilliant.

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