I have been searching for quite a while for the perfect Twitter client for Mac. I tried Twitterific for a while but found it a little too simplistic for my tastes and usage. TweetDeck is a great tool but the layout has never been my favorite. Twhirl is my favorite client on Windows and it offers the features I love, but it doesn’t integrate well with Mac very well.

I stumbled across EventBox a while ago and didn’t give it much thought at the time. I decided to give it another try and now find it to be exactly what I’ve been looking for.

EventBox is different than the other clients as it aims to be a one-stop tool for quite a few services. So far it includes support for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, RSS, Google Reader, and Instapaper. I use Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and RSS a lot so I have found it useful to have a single app able to access all at the same time. The main window is a thing of beauty. It offers an easy, finder-like sidebar with each service, a recent/unread section, and unread counts. Each service shows similar in the main window with clean, separated bubbles, each with avatar support.
You can change a multitude of options including update times, notifications (yes, there’s Growl support), and views.

EventBox is created specifically with Leopard in mind and uses Core graphics quite a bit, including a HUD (heads up display) you can integrate into the menu bar to quickly view recent events and even reply to your services. Those familiar with Twitterific will recognize the HUD already. I found the main window to be more useful for me so I have disabled the HUD, but I know quite a few who find it perfect for their needs.

There are still a few bugs (it’s a beta) to be worked out and a couple features I would love to see. The biggest missing feature for me was the inability to have only @replies and DMs show up in Growl. If you follow quite a few people on Twitter you’ll quickly find the Growl messages become too frequent. I also would love to see the RSS feature be able to sync with NewsGator service. I’m actually a little surprised they went after Google Reader before working on the Mac standard of RSS syncing.

You can get a free copy of EventBox for a few more days at MacHeist. It costs $15 otherwise (while in beta). I highly recommend giving it a try. If your a social web addict and Mac user, it’s $15 very well spent!