ikreateit.com

Last week I pub­lished an arti­cle on how to man­age your RSS feeds and social media and why it was impor­tant to do so. This week, Socialite (for­merly Event­Box) has finally been released by Real­Mac­Soft­ware (the mak­ers of Rapid­Weaver) and it seems only appro­pri­ate to take a look at the new app — which has promptly replaced Tweet­deck and Gruml on my startup items list.

So, what is it good for?

Socialite is a one-stop news aggre­ga­tor for your RSS feeds, Flickr pho­tos, Digg & Face­book account and of course — Twit­ter. If you are like me a fan of hav­ing one app han­dling mul­ti­ple tasks, Socialite does the job beau­ti­fully. It is not only visu­ally appeal­ing, but it inte­grates smoothly with the ser­vices named above. For me, it’s incred­i­bly con­ve­nient not hav­ing to jump back and forth between Tweet­deck (for Twit­ter and Face­book), Gruml (for RSS) and Flick­ery (for Flickr). The only thing I wish Socialite would incor­po­rate as well is sup­port for Delicious.

Set­ting up ser­vices is as easy as enter­ing your account details, wait­ing for con­fir­ma­tion or allow­ing Socialite access to the account — and you’re set.

If the ‘Unread’ group is selected, all your news, tweets, pho­tos, sta­tus updates etc from var­i­ous accounts are dis­played in one time­line, most recent events at the top. The side­bar allows you to eas­ily nav­i­gate between the ser­vices, if you are only inter­ested in your tweets, for exam­ple. Socialite lets you set key­board short­cuts for pretty much every­thing, very con­ve­nient if you are a key­board addict like me.

Google Reader & RSS

Socialite plays very nice with Google reader, dis­plays your folder struc­ture (if you have any) and gives you access to your starred items. You can browse news either by feed or see all recent news at once, depend­ing on your selec­tion in the left pane. By click­ing on one news item, a read­ing pane opens at the bot­tom of the main win­dow. Click­ing on the title in the read­ing pane will open the arti­cle in your stan­dard browser. Small icons next to the feed items allow you to instantly open them in a browser, share or email them, re-tweet them and star them.

Twit­ter & Flickr

Keep­ing track of tweets has never been nicer. By default, Socialite dis­plays Men­tions, Mes­sages and Favorites in addi­tion to the time­line. It also keeps searches stored for you or pro­file look-ups.

While hav­ing your Twit­ter account selected, the bot­tom pane in the main win­dow turns from read­ing pane to mes­sage com­pos­ing area. With the key­board short­cut CMD-Enter you can send tweets with­out resort­ing to your mouse. I was actu­ally quite irri­tated at first that a sim­ple ENTER was not enough, but the com­bined short­cut actu­ally pre­vents you from send­ing tweets by acci­dent when you hit the wrong key. After just one week, I have become quite accus­tomed to it.

For Flickr, you can upload, tweet, com­ment, email and view images right from within Socialite, mak­ing it almost unnec­es­sary to actu­ally go to the Flickr web­site. In addi­tion to your own pho­tos, your contact’s images are dis­played and if you choose so, also the cur­rent Flickr photo stream.

Ver­dict

For heavy Twit­ter and RSS users, Socialite is a wor­thy can­di­date to take into con­sid­er­a­tion. It is reli­able, sta­ble and fast in addi­tion to being beau­ti­ful (and even though we know that looks are not every­thing, they still are appealing).

Like I men­tioned before, I still miss Deli­cious sup­port but I hope that the team at Real­Mac­Soft­ware will imple­ment that in the near future. Of course, everyone’s needs dif­fer, so there are already fea­ture requests for LinkedIn, Youtube and other ser­vices on the Real­Mac­Soft­ware forum. What we should not expect too soon, unfor­tu­nately, is the abil­ity to sync Socialite across mul­ti­ple Macs. That is some­thing that is actu­ally quite impor­tant to me, but a user has found a way of achiev­ing it via Drop­box and a sep­a­rate keychain.

As expected, there are still some hic­cups with a 1.0 release. I, for exam­ple, have found a weird behav­ior when run­ning Socialite on my sec­ondary dis­play. But the sup­port is very respon­sive and I am con­fi­dent that they will find a solu­tion for that as well.

You can down­load Socialite for free and use it free with up to three dif­fer­ent accounts.