app review: Twitter for iPad
September 7, 2010 by Daynah · Leave a Comment
Twitter for iPad recently launched! The official Twitter app was updated to be a universal app, working both on the iPhone and iPad. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much bells and whistles, but once you figure out all the little hidden secrets, you’ll definitely love the new user interface.
When you first launch the app, you have a left panel with links to your Timeline, Mentions, Lists, Messages, Profile and Search. On the right side is your timeline of tweets. If you’re holding the iPad in landscape mode, the tweets only take up the center area of the screen. You might think that it’s wasting a lot of space the first time you see it. But try tapping on a tweet. The tweet will expand and create a new panel to the right of the timeline. The edge this app has over other iPad Twitter apps is the built-in browser that will display webpages, videos, and photos linked in tweets without closing the app. Having content display in-lined makes the Twitter user experience flow much more seamlessly. If you tapped a tweet that was part of a conversation, the tweets will also be grouped together in a new panel. This makes keeping up with conversations much easier!
As you click on tweets, new panels will appear to the right. You can swipe to slide through the panels to bring up more content. I find this to be an ingenious way to use the space of the iPad. A lot of content is displayed at one time and getting to specific data is as easy as a tap away.
Tips for getting the most out of the Twitter app:
Pinch a tweet and it’ll expand. I find it much easier to use two fingers (one on each hand) and drag out (mimicking a pinch movement). Some of the tweets are one-liners, so the tabs are pretty narrow. If you find a long tweet, it’s much easier to pinch.
Another tip is to use two fingers and drag down on a tweet. This displays the conversation (@replies) in a panel below. I thought this was a very clever way to display tweets. Be sure to keep both fingers on the tweet though. Once you let go, it’ll quickly roll-up like window shades!
If you have an iPhone, you may be interested in our walk-though of Twitter for the iPhone.
Download the Twitter iPhone/iPad app for free now.
More Screenshots
Viewing @replies and a follower’s profile.
The interface for replying and sending a tweet.
Hot and Rising app: Twitter official for iPhone
June 9, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
Twitter’s acquisition of popular independent iPhone app Tweetie (and the hiring of Tweetie’s sole developer in the process) earlier this year has finally paid off for users in the form of Twitter for iPhone, which is based on Tweetie and still performs quite a bit like it but is now a completely free app for iPhone and iPod touch users. While there are still dozens of third party Twitter apps in the App Store which each have various features and cater to various niches, it’s fairly easy to recommend Twitter for iPhone as the best place for users to start.
The app comes complete with support for Twitter lists, search, retweeting, trending topics, and the ability to be logged into multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously (handy if you’ve got professional and personal Twitter accounts). The only widespread complaint from users thus far is that the new icon, which features a bird in white silhouette with no eyes, looks a bit creepy.
A more serious, but much more rare, complaint is that a few users are still suffering from the same caching issues that plagued a handful of Tweetie users, in which leaving the app and then relaunching it would cause hours or even days worth of tweets to disappear and have to be reloaded. But this issue appears not to affect the vast majority of users, and combined with its free price tag and the potential it has going forward now that it’s got Twitter’s official backing (and funding), makes Twitter for iPhone both hot and rising.
Twitter for iPhone app suffers from same caching issues as Tweetie 2
May 22, 2010 by Beatweek · 6 Comments
The new official Twitter app for iPhone and iPod touch offers some new search and retweet features over its predecessor Tweetie 2, but it hasn’t completely eliminated the caching problems that some users had been experiencing ever since moving to Tweetie 2 from the original Tweetie 1. The glitch consists of loading up the latest tweets within the app, exiting the app, returning a short time later and finding that the most recently displayed tweets are from hours or days ago, requiring them to be reloaded from scratch. The caching bug only ever appeared to affect a minority of Tweetie 2 users, and then only sporadically. But after spending hands-on time with the new Twitter for iPhone in the days since its release, we’ve been able to confirm that the caching bug is still present – although its sporadic nature has prevented us from confirming whether the problem is happening with the same frequency or has been mitigated (in our case we were glitch-free for the first two days before the caching problem flared up).
What’s your experience? Have you suffered the same caching problems with Tweetie for iPhone that you previously had with Tweetie 2? Have you been trouble free all along? Let us know in the comments section.
Tweetie is still for sale
In light of Twitter’s announcement that it had acquired the Tweetie app for iPhone and iPod touch with the intention of converting it into an “official” free app, one would think that the $2.99 Tweetie 2 currently available in the App Store might become a free app in the interim. But that’s not the case, at least as of this hour, as Tweetie 2 still sports a price tag.
Sure, it’s only three bucks, and the app is worth its price tag. But one wonders if, in the name of not causing purchases to think they’ve been cheated out of their money when they later learn that the app is about to become free of charge in its next incarnation, Twitter might be best served by going ahead and converting Tweetie 2 into a free app in the interim. After all, users might want to spend that three dollars to buy a cup of coffee instead.
Why Twitter, not Apple, bought Tweetie
April 10, 2010 by Bill Palmer · 1 Comment
Turns out I was half right. Last Monday, in an iChat conversation with another member of the Beatweek staff, I pointed out the fact that Tweetie’s developer had been way too quiet about Tweetie for iPad. By all rights he should have either released it, told people that it was coming soon, or asked people for patience. The fact that none of those three things had happened yet suggested that something else was going on, something bigger which was preventing him from releasing anything or talking about a release, or for that matter talking at all – in fact the @Tweetie account on Twitter had been quiet for three weeks at a time when its competitors couldn’t stop talking about their plans for iPad-specific versions.
To my mind the most likely suitor was Apple. I’d seen some rumor floating around that the company had been working on a super-social app which tied into networks like Twitter and Facebook, and I thought perhaps maybe Apple wanted to get halfway there by bringing Tweetie’s developer in house. After all, Apple has a history of not only acquiring a piece of indie software but also “acquiring” the one man band behind that software (when Apple bought SoundJam from Brian Robbins a decade ago, they then hired him to help turn SoundJam into what would become iTunes), and Tweetie 2.0 does show the most interface promise by far of any social app I’ve ever used on my iPhone. So if Apple is indeed trying to further conquer the world by revolutionizing social network interaction, then they’re doing it in house. Then again, maybe Apple is just wisely choosing to remain hands-off with this stuff so that the cream of the third party crop can rise to the top of its own accord. Not that Tweetie Twitter for iPhone is necessarily a third party app anymore, but you get the idea. Part of me wishes Apple would do a little more outsized app development in order to show all these third party developers how to do a user interface right, but Tweetie was one of the few third party apps that seemed to pretty much be up to Apple-like intuitiveness standards; all Loren Brichter ever needed was more muscle, which he’ll now get as part of Twitter. Not as much muscle as he’d gotten if he were joining the Apple team today instead of Twitter, but as Biz Stone pointed out last month, Team Twitter does now have more employees than characters allowed per tweet.
So why didn’t I blog about my buyout suspicions publicly? It was just a little too left of field for our publication (“someone’s being too quiet lately and I heard some crazy rumor…”), and there was no real way to pursue my suspicions journalistically; if Loren wasn’t talking about Tweetie, then he certainly wasn’t going to talk to anyone about why he wasn’t talking about it, and of course Apple doesn’t talk to anyone about anything ever.
Funny how sometimes you just know something is going on, even if you can’t figure out what.
PS: posting the news on a Friday night? Really? Either you do that because you want to bury it and you don’t want the big headlines, or do you wanted the big headlines but you don’t have enough media savvy to know that Friday night news stories don’t get big headlines. I wonder which of those two applied to the timing of Twitter’s announcement?
