Cloudy Days and Connected Nights

Osfoora is Said M. Moroof’s second Twitter client. His first, Landscape Tweets, is still in the app store, and when introduced was unique in being the only Twitter client which offered landscape view in all views, not just in compose. Unfortunately, within a month of his publishing the app, many of the better known and better established clients also went full landscape. Landscape Tweet got lost in the crowd.

Osfoora is completely new app, written from the ground up to take advantage of Twitter’s newest features. Osfoora, by the way, means “Little Bird” in Arabic. Hence half the pun in the title of this review…but only half the pun. Osfoora does an excellent job of implementing Twitter standard features, most of what we have come to expect of an iPhone Twitter client, and a few that are still fairly rare…but it does it just differently enough to stand out a bit. (Not, certainly, as differently as Twittelator Pro 3.x…the UI will be familiar to anyone who has used any of the other major Twitter offerings…but different enough to notice).

Before getting into the feature set and UI, though, let me say that Osfoora is among the fastest Twitter clients I have used on my iPhone 3G. It loads fast, and is particularly responsive within.

The feature and UI difference begins with the big bold Home view, with a set of icons for every major function. This is a nice touch, and would be even nicer if it were easier to access from the other views. Sometimes the only way to get there is to use the back button at the top of views to back through the other views you have had open. Personally I would replace the Profile icon in the hidden top toolbar with Home and solve the problem.

Ah yes, the hidden toolbar!

Pulling down the view from the top on most views exposes three icons: Profile, Refresh, and To Bottom. Pull down until it says "release for toolbar” and it will stay long enough for you to choose one. This only works if you have already scrolled the view to the top, but is is both clever and handy. In the best of all worlds you would be able to choose the icons presented there.

Another somewhat unique feature is the full menu of options that pops up from the bottom when you hold your finger on a tweet for more than a second. I might note that Retweet on this menu is Twitter native retweet, and you are not given the option of commenting. If you choose Retweet on the Tweet View, on the other hand, you are given a choice between Twitter native and the old RT style with possible comments.

While we are on the subject of Retweets, Osfoora offers full integration of Twitter native system, with My Retweets, My Tweets, Retweeted, and Retweets by others options in the user profile. (See screen shot below.)

Note the Translate in the pop-up menu. Osfoora joins a still fairly small group of Twitter apps that provides instant translation of tweets (I can think of 2 others off hand.) Translation is also available on the Tweet View, in the action menu.

Profile opens the sender’s profile…you are not given a choice if there are @user mentions within the tweet. (To view @users’ profiles you can open the Tweet View, where all @users are displayed as links.) You can also view the sender’s profile outside the menu on the Time Line (or other list views) by tapping the user pic.

Osfoora also offers full Twitter List implementation. My only quibble on the lists is that it often takes a lot of taps to get to the list you want to view. Either you have to get back to the Home view, which, as above, sometimes requires lots of taps, or you have to get there through your own profile, in which case any list is at least 4 taps deep. A simple two tap route would be nice…three at most. But that is just a quibble…I could easily live with Osfoora’s list implementation.

Another Osfoora feature, shared by only one other client that I know of, is the ability to attach more than one image (or other media) to a tweet. For some strange reason, you can not do this if you select an image directly from the camera. That wipes out your other attachments. Note in this compose view that you can also directly access a searchable list of your friends, put in the location, call up your frequently used hastags, and shorten either text (Twitlonger) or urls. You have a choice of two short url servers and can use your custom account if you want.

One final feature, now pretty common, but worthy of note: the ability to view @replies in conversation view. Note the little “in reply” icon at the bottom of the Tweet View above. Tap it and it opens the whole chain of referenced tweets in a new list view.

So, all in all, Osfoora has enough going for it to be worth serious consideration as a full time Twitter client…unless you want or need push. In this first version at least, there is no native push integration, and Osfoora is, of course, too new to have made it into Boxcar’s list of supported apps. If push is a deal-breaker, Osfoora is broken.

Still, Osfoora has a lot to recommend it, and very little left out that you might miss. Especially if you are looking for a speedy client, you should take look.

A somewhat random set of screen shots follows, just for flavor.

For more info visit the iTunes preview: Osfoora

It seems to be a day for downloading upgrades and seeing how Twitter clients are progressing. Twittelator Pro 3.0 was the first Twitter client to take advantage of the features of OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS when they were introduced last year. It was ready on launch to upload audio and video. I bought it at that point, and it was an eye-opening experience. I thought Tweetie was everything a Twitter client could be…Twittelator soon showed me a whole new range of possibilities…bookmarks, lists, saved tweets and sets of tweets, in-line image thumbs in list view, intelligent tweet counts in all views, etc, etc.: Twittelator Pro was so feature rich that it made using any lesser client seem like a huge step backward. Goodbye Tweetie. (see my first Twittelator Pro review.)

Only the advent of SimplyTweet, which had a similar feature set, a simpler UI (at least in my eyes), and PUSH! took me away from Twittelator.

Still I download every Twittelator Pro upgrade just to see how it is developing. Today version 3.6 appeared in the App Store, with one feature that I just had to try right away: TextExpander support. I have become addicted to TE in SimplyTweet, and I am of the opinion that every text based iPhone app should feature integration. It is hard to imagine how useful it is until the the 6th time you begin a tweet with “Just in case you missed it:”. Setting a TE snippet to “jicumi” allows you to type just that: “jicumi” and have it magically expanded into the whole phrase, including the “:”. I use it all the time.

With the exception of Push, Twittelator Pro has done an excellent job of keeping up with new features of the OS and Twitter. This version does both traditional Retweets (with the possibility of comments) and the new Twitter native Retweet. And Twitter native lists have replaced the custom lists in previous versions of Twittelator. The advantage of using the Twitter native lists is, of course, portability. Any app that uses Twitter native lists, including the Twitter web interface itself, can use the same lists you create on Twitter, or in another client that integrates the list features. When you switch clients, for whatever reason, you do not lose your lists. Of course there is a price. Twitter lists only collect direct tweets from users. They do not collect replies. Most custom lists in the clients that implemented them collected both. You can’t have everything.

Twittelator Pro does continue to provide an interesting an unique feature called Bookmarks. This allows you to add a user to a list you can later access from the More menu to call up all that user’s tweets with a single touch.

Another of the can haves of Twittelator is  geotagging. It supports native Twitter geo tags and does an excellent job with a built-in map view for Nearby search, which is fully integrated with an intelligent list view as well. It is one of the best Nearby search implementations I have yet seen.

Version 3.6 also includes what the creator is calling an in-line browser. Of course every Twitter client that I know of uses the OS browser calls and interface to provide a way to view links within the app. Twittelator just provides a view where you can enter your own url or go to the Google page.

When you add all these new features, and more that I have not mentioned, introduced since version 3.0, Twittelator remains one of the richest Twitter experiences on any platform.

But no push. Twittelator relies on Boxcar. I downloaded Boxcar again today and set it up for Twittelator. Nah! Not the same as the native Push integration offered by Twitbit, Echofon, TwitBird, and SimplyTweet. Not at all! Sorry. No.

Then too, Twittelator has a UI that, honestly, takes some getting used to. Considering the popularity of the app, lots of people must get used to it…but it is very different from the majority of Twitter clients…and very different, in fact, from the emerging standard interface conventions among all iPhone apps. You won’t see any swipes or tap for pop-up action menus here.

For instance, here is a screen shot of the list view, with little arrows and explanations of the controls.

Nothing wrong with that. Everything you might want to do is there…even if it is not obvious to the new user.

But it is different. In every other Twitter client I have tested on the iPhone, tapping the tweet in the list view opens the tweet in tweet view. Tapping the tweet does nothing in Twittelator. You have to tap the user name to open tweet view. In other apps tapping the avatar initiates a reply. In Twittelator it opens the profile of the user, and gives you your only access to @users within the tweet. It also allows you to do a Reply All. To initiate a normal reply (without opening the tweet view), you have to tap the time stamp…unless the tweet is itself a reply, in which case the time stamp will be in a speech bubble, and tapping it will open conversation view for the reply (leaving you without any way to directly initiate a reply of your own until you get to the conversation view).

If there are links, or #hastags in the tweet you have to  tap the attachment icon to access them. That produces a menu of the possible links for you to choose from. That is the only way to open links or #hashtags, since once you figure out how to open the tweet view, unlike every other Twitter client on the iPhone, the links are just text…most Twitter clients require you to open tweet view before the links go live. In Twittelator you can not open a link from tweet view. Links are never live. Different. Of course, the image thumbnail right in the list view is a nice touch. Contrary to all expectation, it is live: Tapping the thumbnail opens the image viewer directly.

Here, in the screen shots, you see the pop-up menu that tapping the attachment icon opens for choosing which of the possible links you you want to activate, and the tweet view with no active links at all. As you can see, a wide range of options for action on the tweet are provided. Retweet can be set to auto choose conventional (RT or Via with comment) or Twitter native retweet, to do one or the other, or to always give you a choice. The one that is missing here is quote or repost tweet, and, unlike some other clients that have a one tap copy the whole tweet, you have to use the OS selection handles and pop-up to copy the tweet for inclusion in a new tweet.

I am not making a better/worse argument here: just pointing out that Twittelator’s UI is different, and non-standard in many ways. Cryptic. It does everything you need it to do, but it takes some time to find out how to do any given thing…and some effort to remember. (There is a fairly trough instruction manual on-line and accessible from within the app). It is easy for those already in the know. Not so much for new users. You may love it and think that all Twitter clients should work this way.

I could get used to it. And the rich feature set of Twittelator makes it worthwhile. As you would expect, the longer I live with the app, the more normal it seems. But honestly, there are a growing number of clients which have all the power features of Twittelator Pro, plus a less cryptic UI , and even fully integrated push.

Still for all that, Twittelator Pro may be just your cup of Twitter Tea. It still offers features no other client offers, and has just about every feature anyone else provides. If only it did native push. I am using it as my default client, at least until SimplyTweet implements the latest Twitter native features (lists and retweet).

For more info on Twittelator go to the Stone Design web site. Or to the App Store: Twittelator Pro.

My very first Twitter client on my iPod Touch, before I even owned an iPhone, was Twitterfon, and it was the winner in my first show-down review of iPhone Twitter clients. That is way back in the day when Twitterfon was only available in a free version, and was clearly the best of the clients available for free. There were a lot of things I liked about Twitterfon, but it was soon overtaken in the features race by Tweetie, then Twitalator Pro and finally by SimplyTweet, which combined the simplicity of Tweetie with the feature set of Twitalator for what I consider to be the best tweeting experience on the iPhone.

Twitterfon Pro (in the next show-down review) was a valiant effort to regain ground. In the meantime, legal issues forced a name change: from Twitterfon to Echofon. The independent developer, working for the fun of it in his spare time, became a business with hopes of making a profit, and Echofon for the Mac and Echofon Pro for the iPhone were born.

I bought Twitterfon Pro, as you can see from the review sited above.  Echofon has one really great feature. Since the Twitterfon days, Echofon is one of the few (if not the only) Twitter client to offer active links right in the list views…user names and @s, hashtags and urls are all highlighted and live. Touch one and it opens the appropriate view directly, without opening the tweet in tweet view. This makes so much sense that I have always wondered why all the clients don’t do it that way.

I keep my copy of Twitterfon/Echofon Pro updated and install it after each update to see how it is developing. A version or so ago Echofon became only the 4th iPhone Twitter client to offer fully integrated global push. Most of the top selling Twitter apps rely on Boxcar for Push, and, as good as Boxcar is, it does not offer the functionality of true native push. Twitbit, TwitBird, and SimplyTweet all do push right (though you pay extra for it, as an in-app purchase, in TwitBird). Echofon joined that crew as soon as they offered global push, and they even offer a user adjustable sleep timeout for pushes (which not all of the others do).

Beyond that, I am happy to report that with version 3.0, Echofon has achieved a rich enough set of features so that, when combined with one of the better UIs going,  I would consider it as a alternative to SimplyTweet as my primary Twitter client. In fact it is doing that duty right now, while I wait for the next SimplyTweet update.

For one thing, Echofon is fast. It caches past tweets so it comes up with list views populated, and it only downloads the past 200 tweets or so (and provides a count). While I like SimplyTweet’s down load all since last view policy…because I like, for some bizarre reason, to know how many tweets I am not reading…it does slow ST down on launch…and I have come to realize I will never read most of those 6 hour old tweets anyway. 200 (which with my 900 tweeple is between an hour and two hours depending on the time of day) is enough. Especially if means the Echofon is up and running fast.

In other features, Echofon Pro 3.0 maintains live links in the list views, along with instant reply (just tap the avatar). It adds support for Twitter’s native lists and geotagging. The list interface is particularly robust. Anything you can do with a Twitter list, you can do from Echofon, quickly and easily.

Echofon Pro also has a feature I have not seen before anywhere: there is a search box at the top of every list view, and it allows you to search your own timeline, mentions, or DMs for whatever text occurs to you (see the screen shot above left). I was not sure how valuable it was until I actually needed to find a tweet I remembered reading and wanted to look at again. There is some power in that search box!

Echofon also has both Twitter native retweet and old-style RT (which still allows for commenting RTs). Then there is full Profile editing; conversation view of replies and DMs; thumb-nail of images in tweet view, easy user look-up in Composition view; search by username, name, or company (which I believe is actually a feature unique to Echofon); and Nearby search with map.

Unfortunately the Map nearby search is somewhat awkwardly implemented. The initial search area is way too small, at least here in semi-rural ME, and it seems to take a long time to find tweets. So far I have had to move the map off center to get it find any tweets at all. You can pinch zoom the map down to cover a larger area, but it only finds tweets on the current section of displayed map…and list view only shows those tweets already found in map view. Other clients that feature a nearby search seem to pull down a list really fast, and those that feature a map view (TwitBird for instance) have a selectable search radius, and seem to be much faster (plus the TwitBird map search graphics, with a sweeping radar effect, are just way cool!). Nearby search is not a feature I use, so for me it is not a deal-breaker…but your usage and needs may differ.

What Echofon does not do…

• provide landscape in all views (it only has it in Compose)
• display real name with tweets (come on guys, this one is so easy…either display both as SimplyTweet does, or make it user selectable as several others do)
• have TextExpander support (I use this, like all the time (latt), in SimplyTweet)
• provide an easy way to quote or repost a tweet (totally possible with copy and paste, of course, but Tweetie’s quote and SimplyTweet’s repost one touch actions have me spoiled).

Echofon Pro 3.0, with global push and a unique mix of features, including the latest Twitter native lists and geotagging, has got to be a strong contender for the best Twitter client on the iPhone, and the one Twitter client you will use everyday.

Visit Echofon for more information, or purchase on the App Store at EchofonPro. (iTunes link).

More screen shots, pretty much self explanatory.

SimplyTweet's Full Landscape views

Okay. Come on now. SimplyTweet 2.5 is a whole new app, right? This has to be more than a free version update. It takes the amazingly rich SimTw feature set and the refined interface and adds some significantly awesome new features (like full TextExtender integration!) while providing a major UI overhaul that makes for what amounts to a whole new (and improved) user experience. This has to be SimplyTweet Plus, or SimTweet Ultra, or something. Right?

I mean, didn’t someone just justify (and rightly so in my opinion) adding a 2 to his app’s name and charging as though it were new based on similar changes? (And that was without push!)

Mentions view in Landscape

SimplyTweet 2.5 is not just an improvement on what I consider the best Twitter app for the iPhone and iPod Touch…it is that, of course…but as I see it, version 2.5 qualifies as a whole new app. What we have in SimplyTweet 2.5 goes beyond the accumulation of all the little (and bigger) enhansenents and refinements in the 5 versions since push was introduced with 2.0. In fact, a user who has not looked at SimplyTweet since 2.0 would be completely justified in thinking they had discovered a new Twitter client…one with all the advanced features, push, saved views, multiple accounts, etc. etc. that were there in SimplyTweet 2.0, but one that presented such a different (read better!) user experience that it could not, certainly, be the same app.

Saved Lists in SimplyTweet

As I have noted before here, SimplyTweet is a Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch which is in rapid development. What is rapid?…how about a new version every two to three weeks…or just about as fast as the App Store approval process allows. The developer is continuously adding features and tweaking the UI based on customer feedback and expressed needs. It is actually kind of fun to watch. You can follow his Twitter timeline (@simplytweet) and get some real insight into how a responsive programmer develops an app for the iPhone. Every version adds significantly useful features and refines the user experience.

The primary reason for the new user experience in 2.5 is the full and smooth implimentation of landscape mode. SimplyTweet missed beating Tweetie 2 to full landscape by a week or so, but even if it had not, it still would not have been the first iPhone Twitter client with landscape views of your timeline, @s, and DMs. That honor goes, of course, to Landscape Tweets. However SimTweets implimentation is just about seamless.

Landscape compose, and a saved draft/note.

And it is a surprisingly useful feature. I have always used landscape compose where availabe, but until version 2.4 landscape compose in SimTweet was (as it still is in many apps) a compromise. When tipped to landscape some of the features of the compose view disappeared. (This seems to be inherent in Apple’s implimentation of the landscape keyboard and any programer who wants different has to figure out his or her own way around the limitation.) That problem was solved in SimTweet 2.4. With full integration of landscape in all views, though, I find myself using SimTweet in landscape most of the time. Somehow it is just more comfortable…maybe easier on the eyes…maybe not as cramped and confined. I like it!

Hidden behind the Action icon in Compose View

The second change that makes the app feel different is, in reality, not much more than a name change. SimTweet’s Saved Views has always been a powerful feature. With 2.5 Saved Views are now renamed Saved Lists to better reflect their true nature and the coming Twitter native lists. Oh, and the Edit Lists menu item is moved from the main More menu to the Misc menu under More.

The name change only emphasizes how good the implementation is in SimTweet. You can create new lists in the Edit List view and then choose contacts from your friends and followers list, one at at time, but the easiest way to add friends and followers to any existing list is to open their profiles and choose Add to List from the Actions Menu (envelope with swoosh) at the bottom right of the view. This brings up the standard picker roll with the names of all your existing lists. Folks who are already on a list have a little list icon next to their atvars on their profile views. A list can consist of a single twit who you want to follow closely among all those you follow, or it can be a group of twits related in some way in you mind. I have a list, for instance, of Twitter app developers, and another list that just has SimTweet’s developer on it. And, of course, I have a Family list, and list of my collegues, etc., etc.

Until Twitter fully implements its own List schema and the API to go with it, SimTweet uses Twitter search to populate your lists with the tweets attached to those twits. This has the advantage of calling up tweets you would not have wanted to miss, even if they are buried well back your own timeline.

You can also use a Saved List to hide a group of those you follow from your main timeline. This is a kind of filtering function for those with massive follow lists. Hiding a list can be turned on and off in the Edit Lists view.

Another nice feature of 2.5 is that Drafts are now saved as Notes, so you can access them and work with them at any time. SimTweet has saved the current draft when you cancel at tweet in the compose screen (and choose Save Draft instead of Discard) for several versions. The draft just sort of magically appeared the next time you opened the compose screen…and you could only have one draft saved at a time.

SimplyTweet has also had Notes for many versions. Until 2.5, a Note was attached to a profile. 2.5 integrates the two functions. You can still attach notes to profiles, but now, when you cancel a tweet, if you choose to save it, it will appear in your Notes list. Notes can be opened, edited, posted as tweet, posted as DM, or emailed. Saved drafts. Multiple saved drafts. Multiple applications for Saved Drafts (er…Notes).  There you go. What more could you ask?

If I type "i" now, it is one of my TextExpander snippets, and will auto expend to "Case U missed it:"

Then there is full integration of TextExpander. TextExpander is a app for the Mac that automatically expands snippets of text into full words or phrases. It runs in the background on the Mac and works wherever you are processing words. On the iPhone TextExpander can’t run in the background (not allowed by the OS). Therefore you have your choice of typing up your message in the TextExpander compose box and sending it to one of the twitter clients they support (which you set in TextExpander’s settings) or, if your app is TextExpander aware, you can use the snippets right in the compose view of the app. SimplyTweet offers both options. TextExpander is a separate purchase in the app store, but I am finding that it saves me significant time. If you tweet a lot, and use the same phrase frequently, then you can type the whole phrase in a couple of keystrokes as a snippet and it will magically (and musically, I might add) expand right in the SimplyTweet compose view. You have to create your snippets in TextExpander, and set TextExpander to be friendly with other apps, but once you have a set of snippets, text entry in SimplyTweet can go a lot faster. I like it.

Account Picker: available by tapping @account where it appears in List and Compose Views

Another small touch that I have come to appreciate more and more  is the way SimTweet handles multiple accounts. This is not new in 2.5. It was developed and refined over the first few updates after 2.0. There is an Accounts View, which allows you, of course, to view, select, and add accounts. But switching accounts is much easier than opening the Accounts view. On every list view, at the top, under the title, is the @account name. Touch it, and you get the OS picker roller with all your accounts listed. Choose.

And, say you open open a tweet from one account, and want to repost it as though it came from one of your other accounts? No problem. Touch the @account title in the header of the compose view and choose another account. Or you are posting a tweet and realize it really should come from another account. Same thing. Easy.

And, of course, SimTweet 2.5, as it has since 2.0, pushes @s and DMs from all your accounts. It automatically loads new @s and DMs if you have them when you open SimTweet. And it alerts you to incoming @s and DMs while the app is running too. Push works. Push works really well in SimplyTweet.

Then there are little SimplyTweet only touches: the # symbol on the compose screen that allows you to insert the # character without opening the extended keyboard, the way recent tweets are displayed in account views, the Between Us button on account views that calls up recent public exchanges with that follow/follower, the easy conversation views accessible from any tweet (and from the swipe pop-up icon bar), the ability to reply to  multiple tweets (and twits) by selecting them in your time-line list view (great for building #followfriday tweets, among other things), the ability to customize the contents of the swipe icon bar, and to choose one of several themes for the whole app, etc, etc.

SimplyTweet is a great twitter client. It is the one that is always on my iPhone and that I use every day. It simply does more of what I need a client to do, and does it remarkably well. In my opinion SimplyTweet is the best twitter client on the iPhone by a good margin. Version 2.5 only reinforces that opinion, by, once more, significantly improving the user experience. The developer, we are told, has even bigger things in mind for 2.6. If you are not using SimplyTweet I have one question for you. Why not? Get on board. It is a great twitter client and it is only going to get better.

Tweetie 2

Tweetie was, by far, the most popular twitter app on the iPhone and iPod Touch. I suspect it had, and has, more users than all the other twitter apps combined.

If it had a failing, it was that it was not often upgraded. The author, one could argue, got side-tracked with his version for Mac, and left Tweetie on the iPhone pretty much as it was while other, less well known, clients incorporated a host of new features, especially with the advent of OS 3.0. The fact that so many people stuck with Tweetie through it all is testimony to how well Tweetie did its basic job of connecting people to twitter, and doing the things they needed to do with twitter on a day to day basis.

Of course, that made the announcement of Tweetie 2 just that much more delicious to the faithful, and tantalizing to other clients’ users (as well as worrisome to other clients’ developers). Tweetie 2 was greeted with the furor appropriate for, well, a second coming.  It has now arrived, and been thoroughly gushed over all over the net. It is getting generally, absolutely glowing reviews.

full landscape view: surprisingly nice!

Tweetie was, for quite a while, my own twitter client of choice, but I will admit that I was seduced away, first by the richer (if idiosyncraticly implemented) feature set of Twittelator 3.0 (the first client to really make use of the OS 3.0 potentials), and then by the Twittelator-rich feature set, and, shall we say, Tweetie-like simplicity and speed, of SimplyTweet. And I will admit, right up front, that Tweetie 2 will not become my twitter client of choice (not yet at least). There is only room for one twitter app at a time in the main launch bar on my iPhone screen, next to the FaceBook app.  Some of the features that I have come to rely on every day are still only available, or simply better implemented, in SimplyTweet. In what follows you will see that I am unable to avoid comparisons between Tweetie 2 and both Twittelator 3.0 and SimplyTweet 2.5.

excellent tweet view

Of course, the second coming of Tweetie  has been complicated by the developer’s decision to break with the free upgrade model that iPhone and App Store users have come to expect. He argues that making all current Tweetie users fork out another $2.99 for v2 is justified because so much of the code is new, but, honestly, it is still Tweetie, and honestly, he does not need to justify the upcharge at all. I am sure, from the changes evident in the new version, that he spent a lot of hours (days, weeks, months) on coding. He deserves to be paid a reasonable wage, and the only way of insuring his income is to charge current users (of which, as noted, there are many) for the new version. It is not like this is a $20 app. And for their original $2.99 most users got close to a year out of Tweetie. The developer did warn potential Tweetie  buyers in good time, right in the app store description, that a new version was iminent, and that it would not be a free upgrade.

It is just that we are all spoiled: we expect unlimited upgrades on $3 apps. What planet are we from?  If developers are going to continue to develop their apps for the iPhone, if, in fact, the app store is to survive in the long run, we have to expect that there will be, that there have to be, charges for new versions. The sooner we get over it, the better for us all…and the better for the health of a platform we, if we admit it to ourselves, have become dependent on. I want to see the iPhone and the app store live and flourish. To do that, developers have to make a living. Simple.

Climbing down off my soap-box now, lets take a look at how Tweetie 2 measures up against the competition.

landscape compose: see that character count toggle?

Opens the compose option panel

Landscape in all views is actually a surprisingly nice feature. Tweetie 2 is not the first twitter app to implement it. That honor goes to, how could you miss it, Landscape Tweets (and the version of SimplyTweet currently in the approval process, which I have been using in beta for a week now (2.5) also has it). Still, it is a nice feature and well implemented in Tweetie 2. I wasn’t sure. But I do find myself tipping the iPhone over to landscape a lot in List View, and in Tweet View. I almost always use the landscape compose view (which, of course has been available for a long time in many clients). I really like Tweetie’s little arrows at the top of the screen in landscape view that allow you to move through your tweets without returning to the list view (they are there in portrait too, but I am less apt to use them). Somehow it is just easier and more relaxed  for me to read the screen in landscape. Your mileage, of course,  may vary.

And while we are at it, Tweetie 2′s compose screen is elegantly done. Tap the character counter and the keyboard is replaced by a feature selection panel that includes icons for  url shortening, picture attachment (from the library, including video if you have a video accepting service enabled in the settings, or the camera), geotaging, as well as access to recent #hastags and to your list of follow/followers (for @addressing purposes). These options are not unique to Tweetie, of course (SimplyTweet, for one, duplicates them, and adds text shortening, as does Twittelator), but the icon panel replacing the keyboard is.

landscape tweet view

The other much heralded (and lauded)  set of Tweetie 2 features has to do with its off-line, tweet caching, and draft abilities. Here, again to be honest, Tweetie 2 is just catching up to Twittelator, and Twittelator goes way beyond Tweetie 2 in its ability to save, view, and work with individual tweets, as well as user-defined sets and selections of tweets. Off-line reading and composition has been in Twittelator almost from the beginning (Twitt a later?).

And both Tweetie 2 and Twittelator apparently trade caching for limits on the number of tweets they load and cache. Tweetie 2 apparently loads about 200 tweets at a time, and caches maybe that many more. Unfortunately 200 tweets, for me, is about an hour’s worth at most times of day…which means my timeline in Tweetie 2 has big gaps unless I open the app on fairly regular basis. I am spoiled, again, by SimplyTweets ability to load all tweets since the last one I read (and that can be 1000 or more first thing in the morning). It is not that I read all those tweets. But I do like to cherry pick, and I do like to know they came in.

swipe pop up icon bar

And, speaking of cherry picking, for me, Tweetie’s lack (so far) of groups or sub-lists is a real limitation…I need to be able to have quick access to the tweets of those twits that I really follow, as opposed to those that I casually follow. I don’t want to miss a tweet from my immediate family, or from my closest twitter friends. (Then there are special purposes lists, like my list of twitter app developers

Of course, Twitter has just implemented their own lists function (which is what Tweetie’s author always said he was waiting on). I don’t have it on my Twitter page yet, so I have not been able to experiment with it, and can not comment on how it works in comparison, say, to Seesmic Desktops groups, Twittelator’s sub-groups, or SimplyTweet’s lists…and I do not know how long it will take Twitter to make the lists function available through API to external clients, but I do know that I, for one, need lists now…and both Twittelator and SimplyTweet provide them.

advanced settings include many integration options

And then there is push. I have, somewhat to my own surprise, come to like push in a twitter client. SimplyTweet has great push. It pushes all your accounts. You can go so far as to turn off auto-load for @mentions and DMs and just rely on push, since, even when the app is open, there is an audible and visual alert when a new @ or DM comes in.

Tweetie 2, on the other hand (like Twittelator), still relies on Boxcar or another 3rd party app for its push funcition. True, yesterday they made Boxcar 2 free, and Boxcar 2 has push for FaceBook as well as Twitter (and email if you use the forwarding service)…but…Boxcar is only free for a single twitter or facebook account. If you have more than one twitter account, or you want to use it for both twitter and fb, there is a charge for each additional account. And it is still a separate app, which has to be generalized to cover a lot of twitter clients, and simply can not be completely integrated with any of them…not the way SimplyTweet’s push is completely and seamlessly implemented within the program.

Tweet view action options

When working with individual tweets, Tweetie 2 has an excellent set of options (see the screen capture). At first I thought that the one that I use every day in SimplyTweet is not there. I post the links to my Pic of the Day blogs at least twice a day, and it is very nice to be able to open the first post and simply repost it, sometimes adding “In case U missed it.” SimplyTweet calls this Reposting. Tweetie can actually do exactly the same thing using the Quote Tweet button.

What Tweetie2 does have, that is still, I think, relatively unique, is integration with a lot of external twitter apps and services. This goes well beyond the usual read it later services. It includes TextExpander integration, both send to Tweetie from Expander and in-app snippit expansion within Tweetie…for those addicted to snippets (actually, version 2.5 of SimplyTweet, currently under review as mentioned above, has full TextExpander integration as well). For other examples of other services take a look at the screen shots for the account views and settings (above).

Account view options

Tweetie 2 also has intergration with the iPhone’s  Contacts app. You can create a contact from a twitter follow/follower. I can’t think of any reason why you would want to do that, but it is there, and maybe I simply lack imagination.

Little things I like about Tweetie 2:

1) the way it displays a little icon in list view on tweets with image links, and the way it displays a little thumbnail of the image in tweet view.

2) the swipe icon bar with its excellent range of options (see screen shot above), including an action icon that opens up even more options.

3) the ability to display real names or screen names (though only SimplyTweet allows you to display both at the same time).

4) the ability to view DMs from those who DM you in conversation mode, going backwards from the current DM.

5) the In Reply To button in tweet view that allows you to trace a chain of @s back through time (though the Conversation view of @s in SimplyTweet is easier).

6) switching your atvar to the other side of the tweet in list view for your own tweets: kind of like bubble view without the annoying (to me) bubbles.

7) as already mentioned, the little up/down arrows in tweet view that allow you to move tweet to tweet without returning to the list timeline view.

8) the speed at which the app opens and loads your timeline and the responsiveness of all controls (a biggie!).

Still there are reasons, some big, some small, that  SimplyTweet will stay on my iPhone, and Tweetie 2 will, despite my having invested $6 in the app now, be retired to my iTunes library to wait for further upgrades.

Account view, but no view of recent tweets without clicking the link

The biggest reason is undoubtedly the fully intergrated, all accounts, push that SimplyTweet handles so well. Close second is SimplyTweet’s easy and excellent  implementation of lists of selected followers. Third is the fact that Tweetie still does not display the number of unread tweets, @s or DMs, and only marks unreads in the DM view.

Then there are little SimplyTweet only touches: the # symbol on the compose screen that allows you to insert the # character without opening the extended keyboard, the way recent tweets are displayed in account views, the Between Us button on account views that calls up recent public exchanges with that follow/follower, the easy conversation views accessible from any tweet (and from the swipe pop-up icon bar), the ability to reply to  multiple tweets (and twits) by selecting them in your time-line list view (great for building #followfriday tweets, among other things), the ability to customize the contents of the swipe icon bar, and to choose one of several themes for the whole app, etc, etc.

So, Tweetie 2 is a good twitter app…even a great twitter app. But, for all that, it will not replace SimplyTweet in the main launch bar at the bottom of my iPhone screen! Not yet.