A Look at Tweetie 2

On Friday (09.10.09), the much anticipated Tweetie 2 was approved by Apple to enter the App Store. It has been rebuilt from the ground up, to take advantage of everything new that Twitter is going to be pushing out in the close future. The user interface has been redesigned in many areas to be more space efficient and quicker to do common tasks. In this review I am going give you a tour of the new Tweetie 2.

The image to the left is the standard timeline view. Now you have the option to choose a time format, font size, and whether real names or username appear. If you swipe across a tweet, it reveals the new swipe shortcuts. There are now so many options and things you can do from this menu: you can reply to a tweet, do loads of things with links, view the author’s profile, favourite the tweet and so much more more from the new action menu. A unique feature to Tweetie 2 is the ability to live filter your timeline, and scrolling to the top will reveal a search field. This is very useful for finding tweets you wanted to look at later (and didn’t use Instapaper or Read It Later). Another addition to the timeline view is the ‘Pull to refresh’ function. If you continue to scroll up (pulling down) you will see “Pull down to refresh.” If you do that, you will then see ‘Release to Refresh.’  Doing this will do just that – refresh your timeline.

If we take one step back to the accounts screen, this is where you can switch between multiple accounts and find the settings screen. I’m not going to cover all of the settings screens, but with options like TextExpander integration and integration of numerous other services, these are all very welcome additions.

Another area that has seen an overhaul is the compose screen. It may look familiar at first glance, but don’t be fooled. Pressing that new square button to the top right of the keyboard will unveil a slew of new options. You can now attach videos (upload service used found in settings), geotag tweets, look at recent @ references and people you’re following and add them to the tweet, access recent hashtags and shrink URLs. One lesser known feature is, if you tap the bar at the top (the area between the ‘Close’ and ‘Send’ buttons), it will reveal the account from which you will send the tweet and, if the tweet is a reply to someone, choose whether it is a direct message or an @ reply. All of these have been really well thought out and implemented. If you tap close when text is present in the current compose screen, you will be asked if you want to discard it or save it as a draft, which  we’ll cover in more detail later.

While we are (kind of) on the subject of replies, a Conversation view, similar to the Mac version of Tweetie, has been added. On any tweet that is a reply to someone, just tap it and then tap the ‘in reply to…’ button. This will take you to the conversation where you can reply with one tap. It’s also worth adding that I love the new bubble view for direct message conversations.

Slightly related to this is profile pages. You are now able to do a lot more with, and from, people’s profile pages from within Tweetie. I will cover some of this later but the option to link people’s Twitter profiles to people in your iPhone or iPod touch’s contacts and integration with Google Maps within the app is all really nice.

A particular feature that has had a major improvement is the Search Screen. You now view trends and nearby tweets from here. Nearby tweets has also been improved greatly; you now see it as a map rather than a list (by default, you can toggle between the two one the fly) and you also have the ability to save searches all found within this view.

User interface improvements. The UI (user interface) of Tweetie 2 has not been greatly improved, in that sense, it has been made “cleverer” (which is so much better!). It will adapt to the appropriate view and action you want. This not only saves space on the screen for viewing, but makes for a much better user experience. Not entirely related to UI but really worth touching on are app-wide refinements. It is impossible to go through them all but you do get the feeling that the app has been refined, refined again, and then refined again for fun.

And last but certainly not least is the ‘More’ screen. This is where some of the hidden gems are found. The first is the ‘My Profile’ screen, not only does this let you view your profile but it lets you edit your profile, whether it’s changing your profile image, your URL, or Bio, you can do it all from within Tweetie 2. The next is Favourites having been moved from the bottom bar in place for ‘Search’ and is now situated in the ‘More’ section, hasn’t seen much of an overhaul but if you’re after your favourites that is where you will find it. Another very useful feature, not new to Tweetie 2 but great nevertheless, is found right under ‘Favourites’ as ‘Go to User.’ It’s a great way of quickly finding a user. And now totally last but really not least is Drafts. As I mentioned earlier you have the option when pressing ‘Close’ in the compose screen to save you tweet as a draft. This is where you will find it if you choose to do that. With the option to send to Birdhouse and send all drafts at once it is really cool, although it would be nice to have access to these from the compose window.

1. If you drill quite far into a certain area and want quick way to get back to the main timeline, swipe to the RIGHT over and visible ‘Back’ button and it will take you back to the “Home” screen of that section.
2. Did you know Tweetie 2 is next to fully functional offline? Yep, you can add things to Instapaper, change your profile etc. when you’re next online, open up Tweetie 2 and all you changes will be uploaded.
3. Those little blue lights. You may notice that some of the icons at the bottom of the screen have a little blue lights under them, that indicates that there is an unread tweet in that particular timeline.
4. Block people for multiple accounts. If you want to Block someone from all your accounts, open up their profile in Tweetie 2 and press ‘More’ located last in the list, a new menu will slide out, one of these options will be ‘Block Options’, push it, select the accounts that you are logged in with and you wish to block the person with, and tap ‘Done’.
5. Linking profiles to contacts. Open up a user’s profile, tap the little contact card to the top right of the page. This will give you the option to preview, create or add to an existing contact in your iPhone or iPod touch’s Address Book.

End Result: Tweetie 2 is a whole new app selling for £1.79 ($2.99) and is really, really worth the (low) price! Many of you will be asking if it includes push — the answer is no. If you really can’t survive without push, I recommend checking out Boxcar. Its been handling my Twitter push needs since it first came out and I love it. A review of it will be coming shortly.

Please leave your comments of what you think of Tweetie 2, if you’ve been using / haven’t been using it, and why (can’t think why?) or just general comments. For more screenshots I urge you to go to the Screenshots section of my blog.