Let’s jump back to early 2007. Twitter was still growing, the stock market hadn’t crashed yet, and the greatest thinker the world had ever known was still in the White House. It was a time of hope and seemingly unending prosperity. It was during this golden age that I found Twitterrific, for Mac. I couldn’t believe how awesome it was. It was so unobtrusive. So quick and easy to use. I was in love with it. As far as I was concerned, it was the greatest piece of software ever created. It allowed me to bitch and moan about every little thing in my life.

When I first got my iPhone though, the price of Twitterrific for iPhone seemed prohibitive. I started by using Twinkle since it was free, and then moved on to Tweetie, and was thoroughly pleased for a long time. Then I started writing for Smoking Apples, and somehow became the “Twitter guy.” I’ve seen so much crap it ain’t even funny anymore. Most people never see these awful Twitter iPhone apps for the same reason most people never have encounters with transvestite hookers: there are some things you just don’t need to see. But when Twitterrific 2.0 dropped, along with its price, I quickly downloaded it. I loved the interface. I loved the menu across the bottom that eschewed the standard menus most Twitter apps employed, and loved how panes in the apps slid around the screen like melted butter on a hot pan. It looked so smooth.

Unfortunately, it was missing a lot of features I had by that point taken for granted in iPhone Twitter apps. You couldn’t view pics in-line, followers/people you follow, and it had this weird bug with Emoji that affected only Japanese iPhones. So I was really on the fence about recommending it to people. In the course of trying to get the Emoji bug straightened out (since I live in Japan and use a Japanese iPhone) Craig at Iconfactory got me on the beta so I could help fix the bug. I also got to see how all the bugs that I had complained about were being fixed, and some really cool features were being added.

The King’s Bounty

First and foremost in Twitteriffic 2.1, the thing I slammed Birdfeed for, not being able to view followers and the like, is now in Twitterrific. It handles it really well too. There’s a tab in the menu at the bottom that brings up your followers, people you follow, a place to search for users (that remembers who you searched for), and also tracks the most recent activity from people you follow or who have @replied you. It’s extremely handy. And when you tap on a user, you now see their follower/follow stats, their relationship to you, how many times they posted, when they joined, and when their most recent post was.

There is now also full support for TwitPic-style images. You can tap on a link to a photo, it views in-line, and you can also copy or save the image. Along with photo support, video is now supported in Twitterrific, you can post videos to TwitVid, yfrog, and Posterous. Tapping on a video link from TwitVid or yfrog will jump to the iPhone native movie viewer. A Posterous link will require you view the Posterous site first, and then you can open the video. This isn’t Twitterrific’s fault, it’s a quirk with Posterous’s system.

The last really cool thing I pushed for was an easier way to add found articles to Instapaper. As it stood before, you had to open the article link in the browser, and then you could add it to Instapaper. Another problem was, that if you didn’t wait until the page fully loaded, adding the link early resulted in lost meta data, and the descriptions in Instapaper only showed up as links. I must’ve had 25 bit.ly links in my Instapaper “Read Later” folder everyday! It was extremely annoying to say the least, since I had grown accustomed to the grace that Tweetie handles Instapaper with. What Twitterrific 2.1 does is just as cool though. Now, holding a link for a second will bring up a menu which includes “Copy” and “Add to Instapaper.” With this menu, I can add articles to Instapaper quickly, and get back to cycling through new tweets. My only complaint is that Twitterrific pops up a notification that I have to OK out of to move on. It just has to tell me it was added successfully. I would love it if it only told me when the “Add to Instapaper” failed, but Iconfactory found lots of users complained if they weren’t told it was a successful add. Seems noisy and unnecessary to me, but it’s something I can live with.

There are other changes to the app that I haven’t mentioned here, including the ability to translate foreign languages into English. For a full list of changes, check out the change log.

Fixed Under Consent of King

I gotta say that I haven’t been this impressed with a .1 upgrade in probably forever. If you don’t own Twitterrific Premium, go f-ing buy it. Seriously. There’s been a lot of work put into it, and Iconfactory really listened to feedback. Every bug I found, and every feature I requested made it into this app. If there’s something you don’t like about Twitterrific, it just might be my fault. You can go play with the free ad-supported version of Twitterrific, and if it’s just what you’ve been looking for, It’s only gonna cost you $4.00 for Twitterrific Premium.