The first Tweetie application for the iPhone, and indeed the one for Mac, gained a lot of popularity despite it being one of the paid-for Twitter clients When the second version was announced by atebits, it did create a lot of noise, some of which was aimed towards it being a paid-for upgrade. Personally I disagree with those that think the price is outrageous - it's a £1.99 app and if you won't pay that for a worthwhile upgrade that developers have laboured over then there are plenty of free Twitter apps out there.
Tweetie 2 when you first launch it will ask you for your Twitter login - once provided it will add this account to the account list as it also supports multiple Twitter accounts using a iPhone Mail app style of navigation. The first thing I did after this was to see what settings were available. You can configure:
- Display name
- Date format
- Font size
- Image service
- Video service
- URL Shortening
- Read Later
- Quote syntax
- Auto rotate
- Text expander
- Sound effects
- Tweet blocker
- Follow cost
- Favstar.fm
- Favrd
- Tweeteorites
You can also configure your login for using bit.ly's API service so that you can see the stats for your shortened URLs as you can for Tagal.us as well. In addition to this you can also configure alternate URLs for the Twitter API should you be behind a proxy server or if Twitter is down. The image services include: yFrog, TwitPic, TweetPhoto, Mobypicture, Twitgoo, Posterous, img.ly, and Custom (provide an API endpoint). The available video services are to upload to are yFrog and Twitvid. URL shortening is provided by: j.mp (bit.ly), TinyURL, is.gd, l.pr, u.nu, Linkyy, and Custom (provide an API endpoint).
When you open your account in Tweetie 2 you'll then see the tweets from the people you follow, and the tabs for @replies, Direct messages, searches, and more. If you want to refresh your tweets manually then you can drag the list down and then release it. A second or two later your tweets in that view will be updated. It's nice and easy to do, and isn't that hard a feature to find either but I did kind of like the "flick to refresh" feature TweetDeck for iPhone has.
Moving on to the searches tab you will find that there are a list of trending topics (which can be navigated to), saved searches, nearby and search. The nearby search is actually quite cool - when you tap it you will be presented with a map view and the request to use your current location. After agreeing to this the map will then zoom in to your locale and you will see tweets appearing all over your map. Clicking in the tweet will show a summary and the tweeter with an arrow to view the tweet. You will also see RADAR like waves pass around the tweet as it gets updates for the surrounding tweets. If you don't like the map view you can also view them as a list.
Composing a tweet is pretty much like any other twitter client on first inspection, but if you tap on the character counter it will flip round and the keyboard will be replaced by a 3x2 square of icons for inserting a picture from your camera, a picture from your photo roll, a geotag, username, hashtags, or the option to shrink URLs in the tweet. Tapping on the character counter again will return the view to the keyboard.
When viewing the list of tweets, if you swipe your finger across the tweet you get the option to reply, attachment options (open link, mail link, repost link, read later, etc.), view the profile of the tweeter, mark it as a favourite, or to repost it. Tapping the tweet will load the tweet up in a full window with more details.
The only thing so far I've not liked about this app are the available retweet formats - my preferred format of "RT username: message" is not in the available list of options which is slightly annoying - even their desktop version supports that.
Overall I quite like the interface and can tell that a lot of time and thought has gone into each of the design changes they've made. For the time being I will continue using this app instead of the iPhone version of TweetDeck just to see how it goes after a few weeks of usage. If you're looking for a Twitter client this is a great one to use, but there are many options out there to also consider.
