Twitter for Mac finally updated, but fails to excite

Twitter surprised OS X users Thursday by pushing out a small update for their long-neglected official Mac (AAPL) app. But new features found in version 2.2 are few and far between: they include support for Retina displays, 14 new language options — including French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish (to name but a few), and slight updates to various icons along with other minor interface tweaks.

Before Thursday’s upgrade the desktop app — which started life as Tweetie – hadn’t seen an update since back in June 2011. In that time many users, myself included, came to accept that perhaps the standalone app was never to see any future improvements. This concern was further solidified when in September 2012 reports surfaced suggesting that the client had been killed off for good with no further development planned. But this latest small-scale update clarifies Twitter’s current position: that it intends to continue to update the popular app.

If a recent tweet by Twitter’s own Ben Sandofsky (as spotted by TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington) is anything to go by, we may be seeing improvements for Twitter for Mac more frequently. Sandofsky tweeted that he is taking a break from working on iOS apps to move over to the Mac client full time.

Whereas it’s good to finally see Twitter put more resources back in to their much overlooked Mac app, this latest update won’t blow you away by any means. Version 2.2 is but a minor improvement on what came before.

One curiosity is the lack of support for Mountain Lion’s Notification Center — the app’s preference pane still touts Growl as your de facto notification choice.

Here’s hoping that future updates come thick and fast, bearing more substance and native support for things such as Twitter’s own Vine, and Apple’s Notification Center, for example.

Oh, and Twitter, your old logo is still showing on the app’s Mac App Store listing.