All Articles Tagged twitter client

Birdfeed [$4.99 - iTunes link] bills itself as “A very nice Twitter client for your iPhone”. That’s pretty much spot on. It doesn’t try to razzle-dazzle, or focus exclusively on one element or another, but what it does do is provide a quick, clean, interface to manage your Twitter account (or accounts).

Highlighted features include the simple design, local caching of already-loaded tweets so you can keep reading when/if offline, SMS-style handling of direct messages (DMs) to help keep the conversation flow, unread @mentions (replies) and DM counters, and time stamps to indicate where you last read up to should new tweets have since been loaded.

To answer the immediate question, no support for iPhone 3.0 push notification yet. Birdfeed’s Twitter account says that feature is likely, but there’s no time-frame yet.

TwitPic and yfrong are available for image posting and tr.im for URL shortening. (Where’s the bit.ly love, and tinyurl for retro chic?) Instapaper is supported, though you have to exit the app and go to the iPhone’s Settings app to find and set it up. This makes sense given Apple’s preference for keeping Settings in Settings, and also because it’s unlikely you’ll have to do it more than once.

Great from a user experience perspective, when you get to the end of currently loaded tweets, Birdfeed automatically starts loading older ones. That’s right, no button tap required. (The default is 20 but you can change that in Settings). To get newer tweets, however, there is the perfunctory big honking — yet tastefully rendered — button at the top of the tweet list.

For users who put capital letters in their Twitter account names, there’s currently a bug those accounts to go missing from the app, but it’s known and a fix is on the way.

All in all, Birdfeed is exactly as presented — a clear, consistent, and enjoyable general purpose Twitter client with some great new ideas in a even greater UI.

More screenshots after the break!

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Chad’s excited. Why? TweekDeck for iPhone has just hit the App Store (iTunes link). Doesn’t look to be iPhone 3.0 Push Notification enabled just yet, but the hallmark feature of Twitter Groups and multiple, columnar dashboards (looks similar to tabs in Mobile Safari) are all in place. And you can “shake to refresh”.

Best of all? It’s free!

If you try it out, let us know how it works for you, and how it compares to your current favorite Twitter client.

Twitpocalypse.com defines the event as:

similar to the Y2K bug. The unique identifier associated to each tweet has now exceeded 2,147,483,6471 [...] For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.

Here’s how it may be affecting some of your favorite iPhone Twitter clients:

• Tweetie: Official word: Searches are busted, hoping to update soon.
• Birdhouse: Updated: Publishing is fine, unpublishing is broken. Fix is on its way.
• Twitterrific: Currently experiencing problems after a preventative update wasn’t enough to avoid the great doom. Second update in the works per Icon Factory.
• Twitterfon: Unknown, if you have word, let us know.
• Twittelator Pro: Claims to be okay (thanks @JNHohol for the link!).
• Twitkitteh: Is, apparently, unaffected.

If you notice your favorite Twitter client misbehaving, drop a comment below or let us know via @theiphoneblog and we’ll update.

We generally don’t cover Mac or Windows news on the site, even though most people who have an iPhone will at some point plug it into a laptop or desktop. And we almost never cover software that isn’t directly involved with that plug in connection. Why the exception? Tweetie for Mac began as Tweetie for iPhone, one of the most popular and robust iPhone Twitter clients in the App Store, and as much as the iPhone version set the foundation for Tweetie for Mac, it looks like Tweetie for Mac rebuilt that foundation for the next iPhone release.

Everything that’s good about Tweetie for iPhone is in the Mac version, including support for multiple accounts, an easy way to trace back conversations and fetch user data, and elegant solutions for tracking your timeline @mentions and direct messages. However, though some have complained about it on the iPhone version, I have found myself missing the big honking refresh button that tops all iPhone list views in Tweetie (you have to use a key combo or go to the menu for refresh or refresh-all on the Mac).

My wish list for the future? Double clicking sidebar icons to collapse or expand the reading panel so the application could be truly tiny but still informative when not in active use. Likewise, — tip of the hat to lgreenberg) iPhone style numbered badges to count unread replies and direct messages would be swell (though they may not scale nicely if you let them hit the thousands).

Overall, I’ve never had much use for desktop Twitter clients in the past but it’s been a day now and I’m still using Tweetie. I’m not a huge fan of Adobe Air-based apps, so the idea of a native application appeals to me greatly, and one that gives such an iPhone-like experience, with iPhone roots, just seems like such a natural fit to my usage style.

(Note: Tweetie for Mac has just been updated to fix an issue with SSL encryption)

Of course, come iPhone 3.0, Tweetie for iPhone may not just roll up all the re-engineered goodness from it’s big desktop brother, but we’re hoping it gets some Push Notification love as well.

Meanwhile, if you have a Mac, give the free, ad-supported version a try or take advantage of the reduced, debut-pricing of $14.95.

If you give it a try, let us know what you think. I still haven’t found a Windows or Linux client that feels “right” to me either, so if you have a recommendation, drop that in the comments as well!

Birdhouse is a hybrid app of sorts. It lets you take offline notes, store them as drafts, and email those drafts individualy or en masse for “backup”. The differentiator here is that it’s also a multi-user Twitter client that lets you publish said drafts to the internet’s favorite 140 character micro-blogging platform. It also lets you visit your Twitter history to un-publish (i.e. trash) tweets if you later regret posting them. (Or if you just want to correct an error and repost, like I just did.)

It may replace Apple’s built-in Notes app for hardcore Twitter users, but since it’s exclusively a drafting and publishing app, it isn’t intended to replace more full featured Twitter-clients like Twitterrific and Tweetie.

A clean, considered, dare I say crisp little application, it will no doubt elicit all manner of oohs and ahs from the Twitteratti, while those not fond of Twitter or uncomfortable being overly artsy about their tweets would do well to shake their heads and move on.

Personally, I’m enjoying it thus far. And more than I suspected I would.

$3.99 via the iTunes App Store.

Gallery after the break…

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