Twittering on the iPhone
I take my twittering way too seriously. Thus, I take my choice of Twitter clients equally serious, since I do spend quite a lot of time using them.
On the iPhone, my favorite so far has always been Twitter for iPhone (nee Tweetie, which is what I’ll call it for this review). While it has a few small problems (no manual reloading of DMs, Instapaper timeouts aren’t handled gracefully, layout problems in the DM overview), it does a whole lot of things right. And while there’s certainly no shortage of Twitter clients, until recently there hasn’t been another client that came even close.
One of the popular contenders seems to be Echofon, which has a nice and long feature list (sync between Desktop and iPhone/iPad is almost a killer feature), but feels like it has been designed by a programmer (and I say that as a programmer myself). Seriously, it has so many large and tiny design flaws that I cannot bring myself to use it for more than one day.
Twitterrific is much, much better designed, but I could never get used to its “everything in one stream” approach.
There’s lots of others I’ve tried, but never used long enough to really have any useful opinion about them, apart from “I don’t like the way they feel”.
Weet
Yesterday, someone retweeted the release announcement of Weet into my stream. Looking at the website and then the app store page, I decided to buy it purely based on the screenshots.
After using it for one day, I’ve decided that it could actually become my new favorite Twitter client on the iPhone, where it not for a few shortcomings. So I’ve written this short review.
Note: I’ve tested Weet on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.1, so there may be a few differences on non-iPhone 4 or iOS 4-Devices
The Good
The Interface seems to lean on the minimal side, which I really like. The tab bar at the bottom is smaller than Tweeties, for example.
The tab bar at the bottom is transparent. Not sure why, but this appeals to me.
It supports “pull to refresh”, just like Tweetie. It also allows you to manually refresh your DMs. I never understood why Tweetie didn’t support this. It can’t be that hard, can it?
Support for CloudApp. I’ve been using CloudApp for a while now to share images and other files with my friends, and I think it’s just great (especially the Mac integration). I’m happy to see it in Weet as well.
Unlike Tweetie, the search tab isn’t overloaded and basically unusable. On the other hand, you can only do advanced searches using the Twitter Advanced Search Syntax.
Retweet infos are so much easier to find.
The Bad
The minimal interface results in a few non-obvious things, like holding down on a tweet in a timeline to open a “quick action menu”, akin to Tweetie’s swipe menu. I only discovered this after looking into the “Help & Support” topic in the settings screen. I doubt I would have discovered this on my own otherwise.
It doesn’t automatically reload your timeline, replies and DMs if you just leave it running, only if you switch tabs or apps.
Sometimes it stays at its position in the timeline, sometimes it scrolls to the newest tweet on refresh for some indiscernible reason. I need the timeline to stay where it is when loading new tweets, so this should be some kind of setting.
No landscape support in the compose screen. This has already been acknowledged as a bug, and a fix seems to be in the works.
Only minimal draft support. You can save a tweet for later, but you can’t have more than one draft at a time, and you can only save them to Birdhouse by copy & paste. At least some kind of “Send to Birdhouse” support would be nice.
No way to add or remove users in your lists.
No way to block and/or report users as spam.
The built-in browser only allows stuff like “Read later” after the site has loaded, for no good reason I can see.
The Ugly
No contact information whatsoever on the website? Seriously? They could at the very least link to Weet’s Twitter Account.
The Unknown
One thing I’ve always really, really liked about Tweetie is that it saves your tweets for later if it was unable to send them for some reason. This happens frequently to me since I’m traveling via the subway quite often. I don’t know yet how Weet handles this, but I’m hoping it doesn’t simply loose my tweets.
Stuff I don’t really care about
- It has no built-in support for notifications. Since I’ve been using Boxcar for that purpose, this isn’t a problem for me anyway.
- No sync. There’s no desktop version, and other clients that would support it don’t have an API for it AFAIK. But I don’t use any of those clients, and I’ve lived without sync so far.
- There seems to be no way to add location information to your tweets, either automatically or manually. Then again, I’ve never had the desire to do this.
Summary
I’m really happy to see a Twitter client that could actually become better than Tweetie. I’ve decided to switch to Weet as my main iPhone client for now. Its design & feature set is good enough compared to Tweetie for the most part, and I’m hoping the few shortcomings will be ironed out in the near future. And at (currently?) 99¢ it’s a bit of a steal anyway.
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