I remember when I bought my first iPhone, Twittelator was the first Twitter client I downloaded from the App Store. Back then I wasn’t writing for MacStories, and I didn’t know about Loren Brichter’s Tweetie. I used Twittelator for months: it was a great app that had everything I needed. I saw no point in switching to another application, let alone start browsing the App Store looking for alternatives. Twitter was a young platform in the middle of expansion with lots of downtime issues, there were no lists or location features and the concept of “retweets” was just taking off thanks to the initiative of some users not affiliated with Twitter at all. For what I had to do, Twittelator was fine. Then I started MacStories, and the hunt for more compelling, alternative, different Twitter apps began.
Twitterrific came after Twittelator for me. I used it for a couple of months and then finally purchased Tweetie – which had seen a terrific rise in popularity thanks to an elegant UI design, a fast engine and a simple, yet powerful set of features. I fell in love with Tweetie: it was stable, fast, intuitive, continually updated. It received the support of the entire Apple community, and it quickly became a standard among iPhone geeks to have Tweetie on a device’s homescreen. The rest is history: Tweetie 2 shipped and revolutionized the ecosystem with pull to refresh, gestures, a refreshed interface and, overall, the richest feature set available on the market. In the meantime, Twitter as a platform was growing to accommodate more users, more servers and – as a side effect to media starting to use the service to deliver news – more responsibilities. Without going back through all the changes that happened at Twitter HQ between 2009 and 2010, you might remember when the company announced they were buying Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and putting him in the position of lead mobile developer. Twitter rebranded the app as “Twitter for iPhone”, Tweetie 2 for Mac disappeared from our radars to eventually come back as Twitter for Mac. Twitter as a company has changed (so much that they don’t even want too many unofficial clients anymore ), but the core concept of the service stays the same: it’s all about sharing content in real time. That hasn’t changed at all. If anything, it got better.
This is why I’m looking back at the 2008 - 2010 period with a bit of nostalgia mixed with excitement for what’s next: the developer community has always driven Twitter’s innovation on mobile platforms. Twittelator, Twitterrific, Birdbrain, Tweetie, Osfoora, Tweet Library: these are some of the great apps that have changed the way we check on Twitter with our iPhones and iPads, and have created new uses and interfaces for a service that was initially meant for sharing short status messages. You can’t say this for many companies nowadays, but third-party developers have been the greatest contribution to Twitter in the past three years.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the personal aspect of the story. As Twitter was growing in 2009 and 2010, so was this website. Of course I’m not trying to compare Twitter’s growth to MacStories’ one – that would be silly – but I’m saying I was there when all those clients started coming out in the App Store, when Tweetie 2.0 was released, when Twitter launched its criticized iPad app. Those are pretty big milestones in the history of technology, moments of innovation that a bad ranking on Google Search can’t take away from us. I have installed dozens of Twitter apps, I have seen developers struggling to come up with the right features at the right time, or the best design to appeal new users in a market that was getting crowded very quickly. And you know, there are actual people behind the indie Twitter apps we usually cover – not faceless companies looking for easy funding and a solid exit strategy. From a blogger’s perspective, the adoption of Twitter clients and the rise of Twitter as a real time communication service are quite possibly the most notable changes that happened in the tech scene in the recent years.
But as the timestamps on our tweets teach us, stuff in the real-time world gets old in a matter of minutes. And when something gets old and fails at keeping our attention span active, it’s time to make room for the new. But make no mistake: if there’s anything I’ve learned from iOS developers, it’s that innovation doesn’t stem from a “New & Noteworthy” label in the App Store. Shipping a new product isn’t a proxy for innovation. It takes a lot of ideas, willingness to change the rules and, most of all, a real “leap of faith” to release something you’re not sure it’s ever going to catch on, but you feel in your heart and tired coding fingers was worth the effort.
Innovation comes from the stubborns that don’t accept what’s been given to them.
Innovation is a big word when it comes to Twitter clients. The market has been saturated by thousands of copycats that don’t add any new functionality to Twitter as a platform or service for iOS devices; the official applications are generally fine for average users who are looking for a way to tweet from their iPhones and iPads and Macs. Being an innovator in the mobile Twitter scene today means being able to disrupt what’s already available. I can understand why that could be a risk not so many devs are willing to take, especially considering Twitter’s aforementioned update regarding third-party clients. It’s a tough call.
You may be wondering why I’ve already written 900 words to introduce you to the latest application from Tapbots, makers of App Store hits like Pastebot and Convertbot. I mean, it’s not a secret that I’ve been testing Tweetbot over the past months and that Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad were working on a Twitter app for iPhone. But I believe sometimes a proper introduction is needed, just like a beautiful landscape needs to be admired and examined before a shot. In the case of Twitter clients, looking back at the platform’s history is necessary.
Innovation is a risk. True excellence, on the other hand, is exclusive to those who took risks in the past and know what they’re facing now, when a new risk comes forward.
Tweetbot is the app I’ve been waiting for: an excellent innovator of the Twitter platform. My new favorite Twitter client.
There’s a lot to do in Tweetbot, and several features to talk about. After months of development and testing in a private beta group, Tapbots has managed to release the most complete and functional Twitter client currently available on the App Store – a powerful application that is Tapbots’ take on the whole Twitter experience. You can think of Tweetbot as Pastebot applied to your timeline: a beautiful app that shines on the Retina Display thanks to Mark Jardine’s usual attention to pixels and taste, combined with a set of functionalities and new ideas that make Tweetbot the most innovative and disruptive Twitter app for iOS I’ve seen since Tweetie 2 came out years ago. I’m not afraid to call Tweetbot the “best Twitter client available for iPhone”, as in these weeks spent testing it I’ve noticed a clear improvement in the way I can access and read Twitter from my iPhone, as well as being able to get actual work done on it.
So let’s start from the main screen. Tweetbot allows you to set up multiple Twitter accounts, and switch between them from the same page – which also contains a Settings tab to customize your Tweetbot experience and the various sharing options implemented by Tapbots. Adding a new Twitter account doesn’t take you to an embedded Twitter web view, you just have to enter your username and password and wait for the app to authenticate you. One little touch I’m sure a very few people have noticed so far: if you enter the wrong username or password, the login popup will “fall” off screen. Try it. It’s this attention to detail that make Tweetbot a great app.
The Settings are organized in General preferences that apply to every section of the app, and account-specific settings that you can tweak and customize for each account you’ve added in Tweetbot. I want to start from the Settings as I believe Tapbots has nailed this aspect of the app by providing many options that enable you to deeply personalize the experience, and make your Tweetbot different from someone else’s – especially when it comes to touch gestures and sound effects. First off, Tweetbot can post tweets in the background: if you leave this preference set to “off”, Tweetbot’s new tweet window will stay on screen until a tweet is posted. But if you activate it, you’ll be able to instantly return to the timeline or whatever window you’re in after you’ve pressed the Send button. What’s the benefit? Simple: when you’re uploading media like videos and photos, the posting process might take a while. With background posting, Tweetbot gets out of the way, does its job in the background so you can keep interacting with the app while a tweet is being processed. Other options in the General settings include sounds, font size, display name, and triple tap preferences.
So here’s what Tweetbot is doing to be the “innovative client” I described above: instead of simply relying on graphics to visually communicate the status of the timeline and your interactions with tweets and users, Tweetbot makes great use of sound effects to let you know when a tweet has been posted, when new ones have arrived, or when you’ve successfully retweeted something. It may sound strange at first, but sounds add a whole new layer to Tweetbot – think of Pastebot’s sound notifications for copy and paste actions and you get the basic idea. Yet in Tweetbot almost everything was given a proper sound effect, and quality is top notch. In the sound settings, you’re given the option to choose whether you want effects for all actions, notifications only, or nothing. Why are sound effects such a big deal? Because I’ve found myself instantly recognizing what was going on in the app without even looking. I can scroll my timeline, hit retweet on something, keep scrolling and a few seconds later hear a sound effect and think “Hey, that retweet went through.” Again: it’s all about the details, and rethinking interaction schemes to innovate a platform that’s been stagnant for too long.
I appreciate the fact that you can set font sizes and display users as real names, but I want to focus on tap actions. Like in Twitterrific for iOS, you can perform a triple tap on a tweet to do something. In Tweetbot, you can configure this triple tap to mark a tweet as favorite, initiate a reply, retweet, or translate. I keep mine set to “mark as favorite”, and I love it.