Just over 10 months ago, there came an app on the App Store that kicked the living daylights out of every other twitter app present during that time. It was clean, super-easy to use, fast, had butter-smooth scrolling and yet had a feature-set that could easily put others to shame. This was Tweetie 1.0 back in November, when I pronounced it the ‘Supreme Champion among the iPhone twitter clients’.
But the race to build the ‘uber’ twitter iPhone app didn’t stop. Many others copiously rose up and tried their hands at building the next-gen twitter app, their own implementation of awesomeness. Some managed to gather a small group of following, some failed miserably. But no warrior could dethrone the reigning champion on the App Store. While others rose and fell, this mighty app continued to grow, both in terms of features, popularity and fan-following. It was set. No conversation about twitter clients (on any platform) would ever be complete without Tweetie getting a special mention. The crowds had converted. Tweetie 1.x was arguably the best app on the App Store. And its developer couldn’t be more happy.
But then came along Twitterrific 2.0. The most awaited release of the year, it brought along a completely redesigned UI and with that, a feature-set that put Tweetie’s in the dumps in the blink of an eye. Then came along the decisive 2.1 update. It was the Return of the King indeed. It pulled users like it expected them to, but many, like me, held on to Tweetie, knowing that one day, Loren would come out of his batcave and announce the next iteration of the app.
Yesterday, was that day.
In a post at the Atebits blog, Loren Brichter, Tweetie’s developer extraordinaire (or more popularly known as the man-who-never-sleep and presumably survives on Xcode fuel) speaks the nifty details about Tweetie 2.0, both for the Mac and the iPhone.
While we could soon see Tweetie for Mac arriving in the next few weeks, Tweetie for iPhone is feature complete and will be submitted to the App Store and its endless approval process will have us on our toes. Till then, this writer, who has been Beta testing the app for just over two weeks now, brings you the definitive look at Tweetie 2.0 and what to look forward to when it hits the App Store.
A Complete Rewrite
One of the most stunning feature of Tweetie 2.0 is one that most users will never come to know about. Tweetie 2.0’s code base is a complete rewrite of the original iPhone app. This has allowed the developer to combine the codebases of the iPhone and Mac app, thus we can expect more release cycles for the Mac app as changes are easy to push out on the Mac platform.
The iPhone app is also fantastically fast when switching between views and still has the butter smooth scrolling as the 1.x version had. All through the beta, the app has been optimized for optimum performance and it is evident when using this app, even on my aging first-generation iPhone.
Persistence
I consider this feature to be the one that stands out from the rest. Tweetie 2.0 features complete persistence, so no matter what view you’re in, you can quit the app, launch another one and return back to Tweetie and continue from exactly where you left off. This, coupled with the speed of the iPhone 3GS and the third-gen iPod touches, pretty much feels like multi-tasking or switching between apps instead of quitting and launching.
Same native and simple UI
Back in November, when I first reviewed Tweetie, I was extremely happy that Tweetie implemented all of its feature-set while keeping a native and simple UI. The app looked like any other default app on the iPhone. Tweetie 2.0 continues to feature the same native UI, but also brings along some refreshing UI elements. The tab bar at the bottom has been visually refined with some delicious icons, but minus the text labels. The ‘favorites’ section has made its way for ‘Search’, which finds its own special place there. Additionally, the timeline, @mentions and the DM view icons all display a tiny blue glowing dot to notify you if new tweets in that section. A lot of users wished this feature in Tweetie and I’m glad this has been neatly implemented. As a touch of class, Tweetie 2.0 features a tiny chevron above the section/view that’s currently active. What’s more, the chevron glides along the tab bar when you change the view. Needless to say, there are many more such finer details in the app.
Improved Timeline and Views
With this new version, the timeline has had a visual refresh as well. Gone are the three different themes in the app, as Tweetie 2.0 now features a single white theme for the timeline and @mentions and DMs. This, however, might not go well with a bunch of users who’d gotten fond of the iChat like bubbles theme.
Similar to the Mail.app, Tweetie 2.0 now features the Search/Filter field at the top, which is activated by simply pulling down the timeline when you’re at the top. Here, you can go on typing and watch how effortlessly Tweetie 2.0 will filter your tweets for you.
The individual tweets are also assigned specific icons depending on their status. If there’s an image link in the tweet, there’s a small icon next to the time stamp that tells you so. When a tweet a marked as favorite, it is indicated with a nice golden-yellow star at the top-right of the tweet and when twitter implements their Project Retweet, the retweets by other users will show up in your timeline with a red arrow in place of the golden-star.
The Swipe (I like to call it the swipe-to-awesomeness) feature that Tweetie pioneered in v1.x is also greatly refined in Tweetie 2.0. While Tweetie 1.x only had icons to either Reply, View user’s profile or favorite the tweet, Tweetie 2.0 now features five icons where you can Reply to tweet, pull up URL specific options ( Open URL, Mail Link, Repost Link or Read Later), View user’s profile, Favorite the tweet and ‘More’ which brings up options to Retweet, Quote Tweet, Post Link to Tweet, Mail Tweet and Translate ). These options are also available when you single-tap the tweet and view details about that single tweet.
The view when viewing a single Tweet has also been refreshed (Hello pinstripes! yuck) While it functions more or less the same way, you can now travel through next/previous tweets by using the navigation buttons at the top right or simply pushing the tweet up or down. Similar to the previous versions, Tweetie 2.0 still takes you the user’s profile and opens up the display picture upon hitting the user’s thumbnail.
While Tweetie 1.x could already navigate the reply chains using the in-reply-to-status-id parameter of the API, it lacked the threaded conversation view that was introduced in Tweetie for Mac. Tweetie 2.0 now features the same threaded conversation view, which can be activated using the ‘in reply to’ button when viewing a single tweet view. Moreover, the app now features a threaded DM view too, similar to the Mac app.
The User Profile view in the app has changed as well. Tweetie 2.0 now supports Address Book integration, so hitting the tiny icon next to the display picture brings up the Address Book sheet, allowing you to create a new contact or add to an existing one. Of course, you can even share this contact. Tapping the location field opens up the integrated map view while hitting the URL opens it in the integrated view, seamlessly. While you can still view the users tweets, his @mentions, following and followers’ lists and favorites, the black tab bar gives you easy access to navigate.
Sadly, the delicious orange or blue button to follow or unfollow someone has been replaced by a rather pale looking cell. However, in case of multiple accounts, you can now choose which accounts you want to use to (urn)follow that user. Similarly, this works when blocking someone too.
When viewing your own profile, you can now edit most of the fields through the phone and save them and I think Tweetie is the first app to support this.
This view also has options for the various services that Tweetie 2.0 integrates, but we’ll talk about that later.
Improved Compose Screen
Tweetie 2.0 features a vastly improved Compose screen. As Loren notes in one of the beta emails that he sent out, the beauty of an on-screen keyboard is that you can make it disappear. This has allowed him to include a ton of functions accessible right behind the keyboard. Tapping a little tiny rectangle, that also includes the character count, allows you to access these features. Again, as a touch of class, the rectangle rotates 180 degrees, with the triangle pointing according to the state of the keyboard. While the old features - Taking a photo, adding an photo from the library, geo-tagging (temporarily adds a map link until twitter’s geolocation API goes live), and shrink URLs are all there, the developer has added two new features - the ability to quickly add usernames and recently use hashtags.
Interestingly, when replying to a tweet, pulling down the text-area shows you the tweet that you’re currently replying to.
The compose window also supports multiple attachments and you can easily add, remove and upload them with Tweetie 2.0. What’s more, the app now supports video tweeting to services like twitvid and yfrog, but due to the abundant supply of free iPhone 3GS in India, this author was unable to test this feature.
Integration of Services
Along with a ton of new features, Tweetie 2.0 also features of bunch of integrated services. When viewing a user’s profile, you can view the user’s profile on the following services, right within tweetie.
- Tweet Blocker
- Follow Cost
- Favstar.fm
- Favrd
- Tweeteorites
All these services can be switched On/Off as per your requirement.
Tweetie 2.0 also supports integration with with the Twitlonger service. Not only can you tweet more than 140 characters, you can also view someone else’s tweet, which Tweetie 2.0 seamlessly expands in the same view.
Tweetie 2.0 also makes use of the TextExpander SDK, so you can use your snippets in this app too.
Tweetie 2.0 also supports URL previews, so you can preview any short URL, just like on the Mac app.
While twitter is still working on their Project ReTweet and the GeoLocation API, Tweetie 2.0 already supports out-of-the-box integration for these services. So if and when twitter enables these services publicly, Tweetie 2.0 will “just work”.
One very important feature of Tweetie 2.0 is that it will sync your saved services between the app and twitter’s web interface. So any new additions in the app will still be available on the web view. Moreover, when Tweetie for Mac launches in the coming weeks, it will hopefully have the same feature built right into it.
Full Landscape Support
This was probably one of the most wished for feature by the users of Tweetie 1.x. While tweet 1.x did support landscape keyboard, it was a very stupid and half-hearted implementation and didn’t make any sense at all. Thankfully, Tweetie 2.0’s Landscape mode supports works by making use of the accelerometer, and the setting can easily be configured in the Settings.
Drafts Management
Tweetie 2.0 also features a robust Draft Management feature. The app now not only allows you to store multiple drafts within the app, but it also stores the drafts with their meta information. So your tweets, replies to a user, Direct Message to someone or even Photo attachments are marked accordingly. What’s more, Tweetie 2.0 features Birdhouse integration, so you can save these tweets to Birdhouse. Or if you’re feeling spammy, there’s a ‘Send all’ button too, that, well, posts all the drafts to twitter simultaneously.
Read Later
While Tweetie 1.x already had Instapaper integration, Tweetie 2.0 extends this support for Read It Later too. You can choose and configure the service you use in the app’s settings and I’m sure this is going to make a lot of people happy, including our Editor. Tweetie allows you to directly add the contents of the URL to Read Later, so you don’t always have to open the webpage in the inline browser or Mobile Safari for this.
Settings are not in the settings app
Remember this ? Well, not any more. As Loren outlined at the end of that post, Apple does not allow executing code in the Settings app and hence, Tweetie 2.0 now has its Settings within the app (Do I hear people cheering?)
There are a bunch of configurable options in the Settings, such as choosing whether to display the username or full name, whether the date format should be relative or absolute, font sizes. Also, Tweetie 2.0 supports a bunch of URL Shortening and Image Uploading services, including my favorite img.ly and supports video uploads to twitvid and yfrog.
As a bonus, Tweetie 2.0 lets you track your URLs shortened using bit.ly by letting your use your login and API key within the app so your URLs are shortened with your own authentication.
Custom End-Points and Protocol Handlers
This feature will probably be the most underused feature of the lot, and it’s only the geeky ones out there who’d possibly want to use this feature. Tweetie 2.0 features Custom API End-Points. What this means is, you can use your own favorite URL Shortening or Image Uploading service with Tweetie 2.0. Your service must implement a bit.ly and twitpic like API for URL shortening and image uploading respectively. Atebits is going to have a dedicated section on the site with detailed documentation for this soon.
What’s more?
There is a whole lot more to Tweetie 2.0 than what I’ve detailed above and I’m probably missing out on a few features too. There are subtle features like full in-app rich HTML email sheets - so you can easily email your entire DM conversation in full HTML glory for your reference. If a tweet has a link to any of the integrated image uploading services, viewing the single tweet view will also show a preview of the Image that is being linked. The app also features device notifications on a per-user basis. With Tweetie 2.0, Loren has managed to make the best, even better. If you were a Tweetie 1.x user, there’s enough reasons for you to move to Tweetie 2.0.
Tweetie 2.0 is going to be a completely new app and will cost $2.99 in the App Store and looking at what it brings along, $2.99 is a steal deal. Even then, there are numerous voices of unhappy users complaining that they should’ve received a free upgrade to the app. Of course, these are the small group of people, but it highlights how badly the App Store needs to be fixed. However, I’d still be willing to pay more than the list price for an upgrade, because Tweetie has been the one single app on the iPhone, apart from Mail that I keep using on my iPhone round the clock. Now whether you want to go grab a coffee at Starbucks or go purchase Tweetie 2.0 when it hits the App Store is your own decision to make. To me, this is truly Tweetie 2: Revenge of the Loren.
Update: Now available at the App Store.
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at the end there!
