iPhone App Reviews: Twitteriffic
Of all of the iPhone applications I've been using since last Friday, Twitterriffic has to be my favorite. I open it probably 10 times a day to take a quick peek at who has tweeted and what's going on in the world. Not only have I enjoyed Twitterriffic, it's been one of the most solid applications in terms of performance and lack of crashes.
If you don't know what Twitter is, stop reading this now and go check it out.
Twitterriffic was originally a desktop Twitter client for Mac. It's considered "the" Twitter client for the Mac, so it was natural for it to move to the iPhone once the SDK was announced. Twitteriffic on the iPhone is basically equivalent in feature set to the desktop version, but does have some small added features that take advantage of the iPhone hardware.
One thing that's interesting to me is that they decided to include a splash screen with Twitterriffic. It looks pretty good, but is a little annoying because it's not clear what's going on when the splash screen shows. I'd like to see a quick bit of text telling me that tweets are being updated, the application is loading or the world's problems are being solved. Even after the splash screen loads you're locked out of posting until tweets are updated, so the splash screen seems like it could use some tweaking.
After you get past the splash screen, you're greeted with the list view. Several people I know love the list view, because it shows you several tweets at once and lets you scroll through them very quickly. The list view also gives you some basic controls for posting new tweets, refreshing your tweets, and configuring Twitterriffic. Clicking on an item in the list view selects it, and Twitterriffic will remember that selected item when you close and reopen the application.
Double clicking on a list view item or clicking on the "i" icon on the toolbar in list mode takes you to the detail view. I usually keep Twitteriffic in detail view, because detail view allows you to swipe your fingers up and down to navigate between tweets, and remembers your position when you close and reopen Twitterriffic, just like selected items in list view. In detail view there are large buttons for replying, posting tweets, marking a tweet as a favorite, refreshing, and viewing user information about the person that posted the current tweet. Because replying is only available in the detail view, I found myself switching to that view frequently when in list view. The detail view also has much larger copies of Twitterers' avatars, which I prefer.
Posting tweets with Twitterriffic is dead simple. You simply click the post tweet button in either list or detail view and start typing. You can also take a picture with the iPhone's camera while posting a tweet and it will upload the image to TwitPic and include a link to the image in your post. That feature works flawlessly, but I would love to see the ability to choose between TwitPic or Flickr, simply because I make a lot of tweets that I would like to have on Flickr, especially when I take photos with the camera on my iPhone. You can see an example tweet that I made with an image from the iPhone posted to TwitPic at http://twitter.com/commondream/statuses/858600349.
Overall, I think Twitterriffic on the iPhone is an amazing app. In fact, it's my favorite app on the iPhone. The application performs terrificly and makes posting and reading tweets on the go easier than ever.
Pros:
If you don't know what Twitter is, stop reading this now and go check it out.
Twitterriffic was originally a desktop Twitter client for Mac. It's considered "the" Twitter client for the Mac, so it was natural for it to move to the iPhone once the SDK was announced. Twitteriffic on the iPhone is basically equivalent in feature set to the desktop version, but does have some small added features that take advantage of the iPhone hardware.
One thing that's interesting to me is that they decided to include a splash screen with Twitterriffic. It looks pretty good, but is a little annoying because it's not clear what's going on when the splash screen shows. I'd like to see a quick bit of text telling me that tweets are being updated, the application is loading or the world's problems are being solved. Even after the splash screen loads you're locked out of posting until tweets are updated, so the splash screen seems like it could use some tweaking.
After you get past the splash screen, you're greeted with the list view. Several people I know love the list view, because it shows you several tweets at once and lets you scroll through them very quickly. The list view also gives you some basic controls for posting new tweets, refreshing your tweets, and configuring Twitterriffic. Clicking on an item in the list view selects it, and Twitterriffic will remember that selected item when you close and reopen the application.
Double clicking on a list view item or clicking on the "i" icon on the toolbar in list mode takes you to the detail view. I usually keep Twitteriffic in detail view, because detail view allows you to swipe your fingers up and down to navigate between tweets, and remembers your position when you close and reopen Twitterriffic, just like selected items in list view. In detail view there are large buttons for replying, posting tweets, marking a tweet as a favorite, refreshing, and viewing user information about the person that posted the current tweet. Because replying is only available in the detail view, I found myself switching to that view frequently when in list view. The detail view also has much larger copies of Twitterers' avatars, which I prefer.
Posting tweets with Twitterriffic is dead simple. You simply click the post tweet button in either list or detail view and start typing. You can also take a picture with the iPhone's camera while posting a tweet and it will upload the image to TwitPic and include a link to the image in your post. That feature works flawlessly, but I would love to see the ability to choose between TwitPic or Flickr, simply because I make a lot of tweets that I would like to have on Flickr, especially when I take photos with the camera on my iPhone. You can see an example tweet that I made with an image from the iPhone posted to TwitPic at http://twitter.com/commondream/statuses/858600349.
Overall, I think Twitterriffic on the iPhone is an amazing app. In fact, it's my favorite app on the iPhone. The application performs terrificly and makes posting and reading tweets on the go easier than ever.
Pros:
- Great swipe gesture handling to move between tweets in detail view.
- Great overall performance.
- Post images to Twitter via the iPhone camera and TwitPic.
- Ability to view user information on the go with the user info screen.
- Slightly strange behavior where loading screen displays but user still cannot post until tweets are updated.
- Not clear how to reply to tweet or favorite a tweet in list view.
- Ability to post photos to Flickr instead of TwitPic.
posted by commondream at
7:00 PM
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