Tweetie 2.1 for iPhone

After a short few weeks of bemoaning my €3 purchase of the Twitter iPhone client, Tweetie, @atebits finally updated to include all the wonderful new features twitter has implemented recently.

Already with the new client, geotagging was available alongside allowing users to use their own API keys for photo-sharing sites like flickr etc., so I can upload photos direct to my flickr from the iPhone via tweetie, for example.

Sending a tweet and adding extra data is easy

This was only updated today, so I may miss some little nit-picky features but here’s a basic rundown of what’s going on inside the new update – other then any general updates.

First off, writing a tweet is the same. Just as easy as before to add a geotag as attach a picture, etc. You really couldn’t muck it up, aside from odd spell-check business! There isn’t an incredible amount new here.

Sending a retweet uses the new API, which means that you cannot add your own text/comments to a retweet link, unless you simply “reply” with the original tweet and add “RT” to the start of your message.

New retweet API sticks to the great UI design of tweetie

I know this is all new, and my account had “RT” set up a while ago (but since I don’t use the web interface I didn’t avail of it), but just testing it now, my retweeted message did not appear in my timeline – and appears to simply have not worked. I don’t know why, either.

However, retweets that were in my timeline look nice and very functional. Easy to follow where the retweet came from, too, which was a worry when the API was released.

Overall I’m happy with it – now hopefully the Mac client will be updated soon to make use of this!

The next item on the agenda is the recently rolled-out “lists” feature from twitter, another feature I got early on but never used as my desktop client (tweetie for Mac) never used it.

My measly 1 list with pretty much no one inside

Lists are implemented well under your “more” tab, where you can create new lists as well as explore your already-created lists. Same goes for other users who have made use of lists so you can follow their list timelines etc. Very useful addition to the app and again, sticks to the sleek UI design already present in the app.

The only major issue here is that, like geotagging and retweets, the desktop version of this doesn’t implement these features where bigger clients like TweetDeck do make the extra effort to implement such feature sets.

Using the API myself as a developer, it’s not that difficult. The developer says he’s been working on this for some time with his new engine, that tweetie on the iPhone uses, but no sign of an update or even blog post about the desktop client really is bleak. Especially if you did pony up the cash to support him!

Timeline breaks are a handy, unique feature

Finally, the last major overhaul comes in the form of timeline breaks. These are when you use Tweetie, then shut down the application, and come back later. It doesn’t auto-scroll to the top of the timeline, instead reloading where you left off, but instead of displaying 4 hours of useless tweets, it’ll load the last few mins, and put a break between the last tweet you read earlier, and the last in the new batch of tweets.

Clicking on the break will load tweets in-between in case you did want to read something, as this appeared to be a common gripe of users who need to see a timeline for business, or just wanted to follow the natural dialog of the people they follow. Either way, it’s a nice addition, even though I don’t see myself needing it. It also looks nice and is a clear and defined way of splitting up the times in which I wasn’t on the iPhone client!

Overall this is a pretty meaty update that takes advantage of all the new features twitter brought in. The developer said months ago he had all of this stuff under the hood, ready to go, and all he had to do was “flick the switch”. Well, he took his time for sure, as other apps have come out to take advantage before him. However, tweetie is still, by far, the best iPhone twitter client. This is not the case for the desktop version, but I use it because it’s lightweight and functional – but that functionality is slowly being killed off as more features come to twitter’s service, but never get implemented into the client. All meaning large bloaty clients like tweetdeck and seesmic become more and more appealing.

Hopefully I’m wrong and a desktop client update is coming soon, as I don’t want to abandon it just yet!