TweetDeck for Mac has closed. What’s the best alternative?

If you use TweetDeck on a Mac, you can’t fail to have noticed the app has now closed.

I’m a big fan of TweetDeck. It makes Twitter more bearable, because it doesn’t constantly change the order of your feed or expose you to any of the ‘Trending’ nonsense the main Twitter app/site does. So what to do now Twitter has decided it cannot be bothered to maintain the Mac version of TweetDeck anymore? The solution is, thankfully, relatively simple.

Turn TweetDeck for web into an ‘app’

TweetDeck for Mac might be closing as a dedicated app in the App Store, but TweetDeck for web is still continuing.

TweetDeck for web is identical to the app, both in look and feature set. The app was effectively just a wrapper for the web version, which makes it all the more baffling that Twitter isn’t continuing to support it.

If you go to tweetdeck.twitter.com from your web browser, you will probably find you’re already logged in and ready to go. However, there’s a problem here…

Unlike the TweetDeck app, the browser window has the address bar, tabs and other bits of browser menus getting in the way. If you really want to replicate that TweetDeck app feel, you’ll probably want to hide the browser UI and leave the TweetDeck site floating in a window of its own. There a couple of ways to do this.

Turn TweetDeck into a Fluid app

Fluid is a great utility that allows you to turn any web app into a Mac app that you can place into the Applications folder and in the macOS Dock.

It’s dead simple to use. To create a TweetDeck app that behaves identically to the one that’s just been retired:

1. Install and open Fluid
2. Enter the details below into Fluid

3. Once you’ve pressed Create the TweetDeck icon should be in your Applications folder – launch the app, you might need to log in again

4. Drag the TweetDeck icon from the Applications folder to your macOS Dock if you want to launch TweetDeck from the Dock

Hide the browser menus with Vivaldi

I love the Vivaldi browser, largely because it’s so blinking flexible and customisable. And one of the ways you can easily customise it is by hiding the browser menus and just leaving the web page itself on screen.

To make TweetDeck for web look just like the TweetDeck for Mac app, just do the following:

1. Open TweetDeck for web in a separate browser window (click File > New Window to open one in Vivaldi)
2. Hide the browser menus by either using the keyboard shortcut Command + F10 or by opening Vivaldi’s Quick Commands (Command + E) and typing ‘toggle UI’.

Your TweetDeck window should now look like this:

(The blurred out column is my DMs; you don’t get to read those, buddy.)

It’s not quite as convenient as having a dedicated TweetDeck app, there’s a bit more legwork involved, but it’s the next best thing. If you don’t want to use Vivaldi as your main browser, you could use it as a dedicated TweetDeck app, though. Simply set the browser to open on the TweetDeck page, use the shortcut to hide the browser menus and off you go.