Scribbles
Simple drawing for Mac
Tweetie
Twitter client for Mac
Tweetie
Twitter client for iPhone
Tweetie 1.0
November 19, 2008
It’s out! Check it out here, or just search for “Tweetie” in the App Store.
Tweetie keeps the simple stuff simple. Your recent timeline, replies and messages are all one tap away. At the same time, Tweetie offers a ton of really great features. You can handle multiple accounts, and switch between them easily. You can manage your favorite tweets, delete your own tweets, browse your followers and even the followers of your followers. You can follow and un-follow people right from the app. Tweetie has a particularly cool feature that lets you navigate “reply-chains”. If one user replies to another, you can just tap a link to drill down to the tweet that the user was referring to, all without ever leaving the app. There’s a ton more; you can check out all of the features here.
Even if you don’t use the advanced features, you’ll love the speed and simplicity of the features you do use.
Tweetie has an incredibly polished UI. It it looks and “feels” like a real iPhone app. Scrolling performance is blazing fast. That might seem like a superficial thing to measure, but it really influences how you use an app.
Startup time is comparable to Apple’s built-in apps, which is about as good as you can get. It takes between three and four seconds to launch, and in my tests (over wi-fi), another second or two to get the freshest data from Twitter. That’s hard to beat.
Some might notice that Tweetie automatically loads the “freshest” tweets when it first launches. This is for two reasons. The first is that it reflects my philosophy on Twitter. As soon as you start following more than a handful of people, it becomes impossible to keep up on the entire conversation. Twitter isn’t email - you’re not supposed to read every message. By putting the newest information at the top, you can work backwards. This is either tedious or completely impossible with other clients, but Tweetie makes it easy with the reply-chain navigation (the in-reply-to links). It’s a different philosophy, but I find it works really well. Plus, following reply-chains is a fantastic way to discover interesting new people.
That being said, there is a strong argument for remembering where you left off. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to “remember” across multiple clients. Today there are a few apps that fake it by remembering the last viewed tweet *in that app*. But that is completely useless as soon as you use more than one (which you probably do if you have an iPhone).
If there was a service that could store “last read/seen” message ID, every client could adopt it and things would be awesome. But such a service doesn’t exist. If someone wants to invent it, I would implement it in Tweetie in a heartbeat. Until then, I’m still debating whether to cheat and do it the “fake” way as well.
Tweetie is designed to be fast, full-featured, and rock-solid. People seem to love it already, and there’s still a lot of great stuff to come. There are already a bunch of new features in the works, like alternate themes, inline twitpic viewing, flickr support, and the “fake” remembering of the last-seen message. Upgrades are free, so there’s no reason not to check out Tweetie now.