Cloudy Days and Netbook Nights

iBird Explorer Pro

A while ago I posted an update to the iBird Pro and Plus reviews based on a beta submitted to the App Store. Long story. Turns out there was a really long delay in getting it approved, having to do with the new stricter rating system on apps that use internet access, but it is finally live and available. Though the posted review listed the new features as applying only to the Pro version…in fact they are available in all versions of iBird. You can read about them here: iBird.

For full reviews of Pro and Plus, go here: Pro \   Plus

For a detailed comparison of the different versions of the app, go to the product finder on the iBird.com site.

To purchase iBird from the App store click here: iBird on the App Store.

For French language (and some English) reviews of numerous iPhone Apps try iPhone Apps Reviews. Brief and to the point.

Note the Facebook log!

Will it never stop? There is a veritable avalanche of Twitter clients hitting the app store, and all the apps current there are due for an upgrade to take advantage of Push, if not all the other features of OS 3.0. It is hard to stand out in what is becoming much more than a pack…a herd maybe.

So what is a developer to do if he or she wants a piece of the Twitter iPhone pie?

LandscapeTweeting (formerly TwitterLandscape until the Twitter lawyers spoke) manages to be different on several fronts. And no…it is not one of the handful of clients so far with Push. LandscapeTweeting is idiosyncratic in other, perhaps less useful, but still interesting ways.

Let’s hit what for me is highlight first. LspTw (for short), is the first real Twitter client to use the actual Facebook API to enable simultaneous posts to both Twitter and Facebook. Once you enable the app through the standard Facebook connect interface, you have your choice of send buttons in the Compose screen. One posts just to Twitter. One posts to both Twitter and Facebook. So simple. IMHO every Twitter client should have this functionality. But that is just me. (I say the first real Twitter Client because Pingle uses ping.fm to do the same trick, and Duo uses the Twitter and Facebook APIs just as LspTw does. However both are just composition and send apps, with no actual Twitter features beyond updating.)

Of course LspTw’s reason for being is the whole landscape thing. Twitter is presented in full in Landscpe mode. Many other clients let you use the Landscape keyboard…but in LspTw your timeline is in landscape, tweets are displayed in landscape, profiles are in landscape…the inline browser is in landscape…you get the picture…and unlike iTwitter, which will rotate into landscape and back out for any of these views, LspTw is only (and always) a landscape app.

Strange does not stop there. A look at the screen shots will tell you that you will not be mistaking this for any other Twitter app. Because of the Landscape view there is lots of room for icons across the bottom of the timeline view, and the author has even added a pop-up in the middle to expand the options. Even the design of the  icons  is unique, though not so bizarre  as to leave you in much doubt as to what does what. The timeline view scrolls to the last read when you open the app, but there is no indication of the number of unread updates, or of any pending @ or DMs. That little Fg in the bottom left stands for Focus Group, and works in conjunction with the + in the upper right corner of the displayed tweets to add the friend to your Focus Group, which is a saved group, similar to those offered in other clients. The difference here is that you can only have one.

And you can only have one other account as well: LspTw handles two accounts and two only, but both are loaded on start and switching between them is instantaneous when you tap the T2 icon (which I presume is Timeline 2). Certain functions are only available for timeline one.

You can see the options that pop-up. Note that you can save tweets for later reference.

So far, so strange, but there is more. Double tapping any tweet opens in on its own page. Once the tweet is open you have a similar set of icons along the right side of the page, and icons to open any links in the tweet (one per link in order). If there is a @user in the tweet, there is a button at the bottom left of the screen that opens that user’s profile and tweets, in a page that looks remarkably like the m.twitter.com profile page. There is also a mail icon in this view, which mails the tweet from an inline mail interface.

The strangest thing here, or maybe the more interesting,  is that with a tweet open in its own page, flicking left or right moves you to the previous or next tweet. You can flick through your whole timeline. In this view there is also a tweet count. In the upper right it says 32 /160 or similar.

When you want to go back to the timeline view, you just flick the page up, and it returns.

It is all kind of slick, relatively intuitive, and clever. But it is different.

This is yet another app that seems to want growing up. It has a lot of potential, but the feature set is not up to the best of the competition yet. It may get there, if enough people are attracted to its idiosyncratic design and functionality, its unique logic, and its different approach to Tweeting.

Landscape may be prominent in its name, and in its philosophy, but it  is only the beginning of the strange. Question is, is a a strange that you can embrace? Personally, I can see how it might grow on you.

I will be watching this one to see how it develops.

So, true to my word, SimplyTweet 2.0 becomes the first full featured (and then some) Twitter client for the iPhone to reach the App Store. Available now. As of a moment ago the description was still for 1.7. It will be updated as the Apple server rolls over. See the full review below.

I will say it again. SimplyTweet 2.0 is an amazingly quick, easy Twitter client to use, with an intuitive interface, all the features the power user needs, and Push that works! Get it on the iTunes Store.

Note! I just watched the SimplyTweet 2.0 video, and discovered a new, and as far as I know, totally unique feature of the app. SimTweet allows you to upload and tweet more than one image per tweet. Using Posterious this ability amounts to a mini bloging application of some power. And it is another example of SimTweet’s above and beyond the ordinary attention to user needs.  Here is the resulting Posterous entry when I attached 5 images to a tweet in SimTweet. Blossom. As you can see Posterous turns the tweet into a little gallery. So cool! Using TwitPics you get a single tweet with as many links as the pics you attached. When viewing the resulting tweet in SimTweet, SimTweet correctly intreprets the three links as a set, and displays the pics as a slideshow in the pic viewer! What could be easier and more logical? Totally amazing!

Just when you thought it was safe to stop looking at Twitter apps for the iPhone…

OS 3.0 has apparently opened the floodgates of pent up Twitter app demand, at least to go by the number of new Twitter clients appearing on the App Store this last week. Surprisingly, most of the committed players, from Tweetie to TwitterFon and Twitterific, seem to be lagging behind with 3.0 aware updates. Almost all the real action is in new clients, or in renamed and repositioned clients no one ever heard of before.

The obvious exception here is Twittelator Pro, already reviewed, which takes good advantage of almost all the OS 3.0 refinements and possibilities, as well as providing perhaps the richest and best concieved feature set of any current app. There are a few changes I’d like to see, mostly UI stuff, but in my opinion, Twittelator Pro is the app to beat. There are just so many things you can do with it, so easily, that it makes any other current app seem highly restrictive. And a 3.0.1 version with improvements is due out soon.

iTwitter Home page

That said, lets take a look at iTwitter. If you did not download iTwitter on 7/5, when it was free for a day, then you will be paying $3.99 for this app. In it’s current version, it might not worth that to you. There are free apps that work as well and do everything it does, and sometimes more (but they are not as pretty!).

However, as an investment in the future of the app, the $3.99 might make sense. And certainly with the next upgrade, if you want to wait for that (promised within a few weeks), it just might be worth every penny.

iTwitter has, in my opinion, the most elegant user interface of any twitter app I have seen. Hands down. No real competition. It may still lack what I feel are essential features, and be missing some nicities, but all the ground work is there for it to become a supper efficient, powerful, easy, fast and fun twitter client.

By the way: The standout feature of iTwitter is Push Notification. Yes it has it. Sort of. It only works when both sender and receiver are using iTwitter, and so far I have not been able to make it work at all. Reports are that it works at least for some, some of the time. Like much else in iTwitter, it just might not be mature yet. [Note: I just got my first push from another iTwitter user! So whatever my issue with the registration fail message has magically solved itself! Still not the best implementation, since it only works with other iTwitter users, but it does appear to work.]

You will note in the home screen shot above that iTwitter shows the unread or new count on each category. If you scroll back a page to the Accounts Page, you see the aggregate new count for each account you are working with (you can have as many as you like).

Going to the Home list (friends), you will note several interesting refinements. You may or may not like the text bubble presentation, but the interesting part is that on replies, both here and in the Mentions view, the text of the tweet replied to is appended at the bottom of the bubble in smaller type (see first screen shot below). This makes a whole lot of sense, though it does not substitute for, say, Twittelator’s conversation view…which searches out the whole chain of previous tweets that are referenced, back as far at it goes. Still, most of the time I am just wondering what tweet my friends are replying to, and iTwitter’s approach works for that. So easy.

Note the unread count at the top of list view. There is a Mark All Read icon on the footer. Scrolling down in the list does not make the tweets read, or decrease the count. Replying to the tweets does not make them read. You have to mark them read with the control under the icon.

Tap a tweet and the quick Reply/Retweet/Favor control pops up. Again, easy and elegant. If there are links, #hashtags, or @users in the tweet, these also appear as options in the popup. Very slick. Tap the atvar and the user profile opens up, again in a floating pallet kind of thing. Very elegant. You can drill down by tapping followers, etc. You will see the DM button, but also might note the lack of a Reply control. Glaring oversight! Personally, until they fix that, a deal-killer for me, at least for using iTwitter as a full time client. Still, I really like that floating profile pallet thingy!

Landscape everywhere

By the way, iTwitter is the only Twitter client on the iPhone that I know of that operates in landscape for all functions. Just tip it over in whatever view, not only in the keyboard view, and it will flip to landscape. This is more practical than you might think, as it avoids flipping the phone around every time you come back from posting a tweet or reply.

Note also the little symbol next to the standard location icon in the tweet box. That pulls up a list of your friends to initiate a reply (just like Twittelator Pro). Note also the camera icon. You can upload pics directly from the app.

iTwitter has a feature, ported over from popular desktop clients, that is just becoming common in the more advanced iPhone clients: groups (Twittelator Pro, TweetDeck for iPhone, TweetBox, etc.). You can easily create and manage as many sub-groups of your twitter friends as you like…though there is as yet no way to add someone to a group on the fly (as in Seesmic or TweetDeck on the desktop). You have to use the edit groups function on the Home screen.

So, if this thing is so elegant, and it is elegant and fun, then why is not my choice of Twitter clients?

1) the above mentioned lack of any easy way to reply to someone mentioned in a tweet, or to a new follower, for that matter. You can open their profile but there is no reply control. That is the killer for me.

2) iTwitter only uploads pics to TwitPic. I need other choices. And, of course, we are in OS 3.0 now, so they need to be working on uploads for audio and video.

2) no saved searches [Like most iPhone apps, iTwitter is practically undocumented. It does have saved searches. I just could not find them. Once I did, they work fine, adding themselves to the Home page even. The way it is implimented, you can even use a saved search as a kind of bookmark to make checking a particular friend or associate's tweets relatively painless.]

3) new tweet/mention/dm counts do not diminsh as tweets are viewed, read, replied to, etc. Mark as Read is a poor substitute, especially as you it is all or nothing. You can not mark a group of tweets read without marking the whole list.

4) The inline browser seems a bit flaky (opens flickr links in the main flickr site not m.flickr.com for instance, does not display some graphics, and does not enlarge with multi-touch smoothly), though the TwitPic viewer is excellent, with landscape view and all (just needs to work with other Pic sites.)

5) General lack of the richer feature set avaialble in Twittelator Pro. I am becoming addicted, for instance, to being able to copy tweets, email tweets from with the app, bookmark friends (and especially app developers) to keep track of all their tweets, and so many of the little extras packed into Twittelator that moving to a simplier client is going to be hard on me, no matter how good (or how elegant) the new client is on its own.

In conclusion: iTwitter has huge potential. Keep your eye on it.

But unless it has a feature you can’t live without right now (and that would not, in my experience, be Push Notification [even thought it now seems to be working at least]) then you might want to hold on to your $3.99 until the next version at least. On the other hand, if you can live with it’s current limitations, it is certainly a slick UI! The slickest.

I am going to do a brief review of some other new offerings in the next post.