Howto: Installing Tweetbot for Mac (alpha/beta) on a new machine…
As many of you may know, Tweetbot for Mac has fallen victim to Twitter’s latest shenanigans in their never ending quest to destroy their own product/company. Many (myself included) have had difficulties with the new Tweetbot for Mac beta and are being blocked from using the app, despite having used the alphas previously.
My pressing issue this weekend was the fact I had reinstalled my main personal laptop from scratch and thus didn’t have the previous Twitter auth tokens stored on my machine. Downloading the beta, I was redirected to a page (having DB errors off and on all day) on TapBot’s site which generally wasn’t very helpful (not blaming TapBots, but there could be a little bit of help for people who *should* be able to use the product despite the issues with Twitter). Being a bit frustrated and bored this afternoon, I decided to see if I could find a way around it.
Enough with the rambling back story, here’s the steps to get up and running assuming you have been previously authorized before:
- Install the previous alpha (I put it in ~/Applications since it was to be used only temporarily, but that doesn’t matter). If you don’t have it, no I won’t help you find it. Sorry.
- If you try to open it now, you’ll get a notice saying it’s expired. Try if you don’t believe me. Thankfully TapBots made it simple to get around this. Set your clock back a month and then open the app.
- Before you can go add any new accounts, you have to set your clock back to current (otherwise OAuth will fail, and silently fail at that). Do this without closing the app obviously.
- Now go into preferences and add the account like usual. If you previously de-auth’d the app or otherwise Twitter just doesn’t like you, you might see an error. If you do, sorry, but it worked for me with multiple Twitter accounts which had been previously used with Tweetbot for Mac alphas.
- Now close the alpha and go open the beta again. You should be all set to go and back in action!
If you have questions, feel free to reply to this and I will do my best to help from what I know, but honestly if you follow the above steps you should be good to go.
Enjoy!
-Jeremy
