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Tweetie 1.1, and some other thoughts

December 9, 2008

Tweetie 1.1 is finished! I submitted it to the App Store yesterday afternoon so we’ll see how long the review process takes. First up, the new features. The big one is a new theme called “Simple”. There is a small (but very loud) group of people who for whatever reason hate chat bubbles. I love ‘em, but there’s no accounting for taste. So now you can use Tweetie without the bubbles, and you can even adjust the font size if you want to cram as many tweets on the screen as possible.

Nearby searching was another big request, and that’s in 1.1 as well. There’s also a handy shortcut called “Go to User” which will let you just type in any screen name to jump to a profile page. It’s nice if you meet a fellow twitterer in real life and want to start following them immediately.

Next on the list is a TwitPic inline image viewer, so there’s no need to be directed to twitpic.com just to view a photo somebody posted. Tapping any twitpic.com link will bring up the viewer. There’s also a handy button to save those TwitPics to your Photo Library.

Tweetie recognizes the “tweetie:” protocol handler. If you don’t know what that means, no worries, it basically makes it possible to send links from Safari into Tweetie so you can post them. If you’re in Safari and want to post a link, just tap on the URL field and type the text “tweetie:” (without the quotes) before the URL. So for example if you’re at http://google.com, change it to tweetie:http://google.com. When you hit “Go”, Tweetie will launch, automatically shrink the link using bit.ly and bring up a new compose view so you can type a message and post it to Twitter. Super easy. You can also set up a bookmarklet if you want to save the typing (I’ll post instructions later).

There are a few little things too, like shortcut buttons to email links to tweets and webpages. I recognize stock symbol links ($AAPL for example). The user experience for loading some tweets that aren’t already in memory (like when you follow a reply chain) is also improved.

Even though it was already pretty solid (especially for a 1.0 release) there were a handful of glitches I found and fixed for 1.1. Pictures uploaded through TwitPic now retain the correct orientation (and the link gets appended to the end rather than the put at the front of your message, preserving @replies). Bit.ly integration is fixed - the API Tweetie 1.0 was using wasn’t officially supported, and the folks over at bit.ly upgraded some time after Tweetie came out. The one and only crashing bug (that I know about) was fixed: geocoding was busted for some locations but should work now.

There are a slew of features still on the todo list, and I’m working on some really great stuff for 1.2. I’ll post more about it as the next release gets closer.

I just want to say thanks to Tristan O’Tierney for helping me set up the sweet TwitPic integration (and it’ll get even better in 1.2). Also thanks to the beta testers for helping make Tweetie rock solid (hopefully!).

As an aside, if you’re up for a really great read on Twitter client development, check out Craig Hockenberry’s recent post on the design decisions in creating Twitterrific. In particular:

“There will always be more than one way to solve a problem: a developer’s personal preferences will inevitably seep into the implementation. Having many choices for a Twitter client means that developers don’t need to create a “one size fits all” solution. In essence, users get to choose a developer whose preferences match their own.”

I think this is spot on. The sheer simplicity of Twitterrific is commendable, and I think it targets a very different sort of Twitter user than Tweetie. (I love simple software, if you need proof just take a look at Scribbles). At the same time I don’t think that simplicity and power are mutually exclusive. I think the fact that Tweetie embraces familiar iPhone UI paradigms helps convey really powerful features in a simple way. Having a diverse ecosystem of clients is healthy, and I can’t wait to see how both Tweetie and Twitterrific evolve.

I use Twitterrific on my Mac almost exclusively. One thing that Craig mentioned was the inability to store metadata to synchronize the “reading point” between clients. This is the primary reason why I haven’t even tried to implement it in Tweetie (it’s useless for someone like me who uses two clients). (Though I have since changed my mind, and have come up with a “good enough” solution that will show up in 1.2 or 1.3 - more on that later). I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I would be very open to implementing support for some service that stored “last read” ID. Rather than waiting for Twitter to come up with something, perhaps we Twitter client developers could band together and come up with something*. Having an insanely popular client like Twitterrific back an independent service would be immensely helpful in gaining widespread adoption. And it would be the sort of thing that helps everyone.

* I imagine such a service to be very, very simple. It wouldn’t need to know or even handle twitter passwords with some clever client-side hashing and encryption.