Update: I realize that Tweetie for mac will run ad supported if you don’t want to pay for it, i happen to think most users will pay for it.

When I first started using Twitter a couple of years back, my main point of contact with it was through the web interface. Since then, a lot of tools have sprung up for working with Twitter. Many of these tools, like the Twitter website and service itself, are free or supported by ads.

Lately, however, several Twitter apps for the iPhone/iTouch as well as native mac applications that cost actual money have become very popular. While these apps are typically inexpensive, the fact that they cost anything and hold their own or are more popular than free tools is something of a shift for these types of applications.

The thing that ties most of these paid applications together is their dedication to simplicity and ease of use. These apps are best-of-breed for their categories, and people are responding to that quality by opening their wallets.

Low cost software that outperforms free alternatives isn’t really new in the Mac development community. Applications like MarsEdit, TextMate and Delicious Library have all been charging modest prices for really world-class experiences for awhile. The most notable exception here is NetNewsWire, which is free. However, anyone who has used it for any period of time would be happy to pay for it. So the addition of Tweetie for Mac today isn’t really ground breaking except in how it arrived.

Tweetie for iphone is commonly seen as the best app available for Twitter. Building off of the rampant popularity of Tweetie, Atebits actually had a desktop client launch that people were talking about for a week before hand. That’s pretty amazing.

The developers of the applications I listed above are Rock Stars in the Mac community. Daniel Jalkut, Allan Odgaard, Wil Shipley, and Brent Simmons are all respected and revered in the development world. Atebits has a good reputation, especially for interesting UI design, but people don’t typically froth at the mouth for their software releases. But people were surely hungry for Tweetie for Mac.

I’ve spent money on Tweetie for iPhone and Birdhouse (twitter notepad) recently, as well as all the other apps I’ve mentioned here except Tweetie for mac and MarsEdit, both of which have the proverbial “check in the mail” once my trials run out. I’m a bit biased, as I write software as well, and I have a vested interest in people paying money for good development work. However, I’m not the only one buying these apps.

The sudden popularity of highly polished and well made applications (especially on the App Store) seems to indicate that people will pay for good work, and not just $0.99. Let’s hope that keeps happening so developers keep putting the kind of time and effort into their products that make them worth the premium.