iPhone Twitter Software – Tweetie

Tweetie is a very well featured application for iPhone and iPod Touch. It has a rich feature set including: multiple twitter accounts, view timelines for yourself, public or any user. Send DM’s (Direct messages) to people that have followed you. Post Tweets, ReTweets and replies easily. Mark Tweets via the favourite function or send links via email or save for later reading using the inbuilt InstaPaper integration (this is excellent!). Automatic URL shortening where needed with Bit.Ly. Navigation of message threads is very useful. Built in Web browser for reading the many links you will see (unfortunatley does not support landscape at this time). Adjust font sizes, view trending topics, follow, unfollow. Allows TwitPic uploading of pictures. This small app does most things you want. There are many Twitter applications for the iPhone and quite a few decent free ones. Yet Tweetie has become a favourite for many Twitter addicts.  To discover why, read on…

I began using quite a few of the other free Twitter apps last year and eventually began reading rave reviews from other Twitterholics on iPhone that they had switched to Tweetie and were very satisified with the product.  At £1.79p UK price and $3 approx USA pricing it is not a major stretch to buy, but obviously there still needs to be some pressing reason to shell out cash. My previous free Twitter application was TwitterFon which is pretty well specified itself (see separate review).

So what has Tweetie got that makes it a must have app over TwitterFon? Well, there are many little things but the No.1 killer feature for many is the multiple Twitter account feature.  You can setup multiple accounts and switch in and out of them with ease with Tweetie. TwiterFon Pro, available at almost double the price of Tweetie does in fact have no ads and support for multiple Twitter accounts but the free, ad supported version does not. Another really nice feature I like that TwitterFon does not have is the ability to view the image icon full screen when you tap on the image icon when viewing someone’s profile. Tap on it in TwitterFon and nothing happens because it does not allow the viewing of icons full screen.  It might seem quite a cosmetic feature but you might be surprised at your reactions to seeing those nice icon pics blown up to a more normal size.

But be warned if you don’t need the multiple account feature there are a few negatives that TwitterFon has that Tweetie still does not have. For example the number one thing you are likely to miss is the handy messages tags (called badges) that show that you have new unread messages or direct messages or @ messages. (Note: badges are like red notification numbers that you will be familiar with on an unread SMS or missed call) If someone sends you a Direct Message Tweet on Tweetie you will get NO notification that new messages are sitting there unread.  It’s down to you to actually go into your message sections one by one and look.  This is quite a glaring ommision and I can really understand the frustration of people that have got used to the superior handling of alerts of TwitterFon not being happy with this ommision.

Another quite useful cosmetic superior function that TwitterFon does is to highlight new Tweets since your last session in a different shading thus you can see at a glance which are the new unseen messages.  Tweetie unfortunately does not have this feature. So a couple of big plusses for the free app Twitterfon. That said, Tweetie is a fine application that provides very good stability with a wealth of features.

Below I will give a quick run thru of Tweetie screens and features…

Below is the main Tweetie screen you see showing the tweets from people you are following.

Looking at the main navigation at the bottom of each screen going from left to right, the next option is @ Mentions.  This is messages that have been sent to you or contain your @username. For those new to Twitter you need to understand that people that you are not following cannot send you a private message. They can send you a message but this is public so anyone else can read it to. Often people want to have public conversations anyway and just send a simple @username message. These messages show up in the @ Mentions screen along with any re-tweeting of your messages. This just looks like the screen above with messages populated all with your @username in them.

Next option is Messages.  This refers to direct messages or DM’s as they are sometimes known. Note that you see the Inbox by default of messages that have been sent as private messages to you.  These do not appear in the public timeline ans are indeed private. Some Twitter users use this portion in a similar way to an SMS text message. See image below but note that I have no messages showing. Tapping the Sent button shows your sent messages.

Moving right again is the Favorites section, or if you’re British the Favourites. When you are viewing a message you have a few options that you can do with that message and one thing that you will definately want to do from time to time is save particular messages as favorites so you can return to them later.  When you have set a favorite marker on a message is shows up with a star next to it in the main Tweets window. The square icon with a pencil thru it at the top right of every screen in Tweetie offers you a quick way to create a message. Tapping that icon brings up the message creation screen.

Moving right to the last option brings you to the MORE options page.  This has a bunch of sub menu’s on that I will briefly describe.

My Profile is the top option and is where you will set Twitter information and options for yourself.

Go To User screen shown below simply allows the quick lookup and selection of another users Twitter profile.

Nearby is an interesting feature espicially using the built in GPS of the iPhone. This feature restricts tweets to messages orginating withing the radius you set. So you can keep tabs on what is going in locally. A really neat feature that I find really amazing. The rotating animated graphic shown below never fails to impress people that have no knowledge of what Twitter is all about.

Settings for local radius of messages…