Tweetie 2

October 14th, 2009

Trending Topics on Twitter hit within minutes after this announcement, which massively flood my feed with RTs and other expressions of excitement, rocking Top Paid Apps in U.S. AppStore after about a day, thousands of congratulations and praises…

No other app may brag about stats like Tweetie 2, that’s for sure. But was all the buzz adequante to app’s quality? Or again, did we happen to be victims of a huge hype? Well, let’s try to answer that.

Here’s a review of Tweetie 2, an app that managed the impossible – beated its perfect archer.

Paying for an update

At first, I was skeptical about the idea of giving $2.99 for something, that as a matter of fact is just an update. Even though developer denies, and we truly believe him… an average user won’t notice a huge change, since interface remains the same.

Tweetie 2 is built from the ground up to take advantage of these fantastic new technologies.

A perfect solution would seem to sell Tweetie 2 as an update, but… Hail to one of the biggest flaws in AppStore – Apple in one of its genius ideas decided not to allow paid updates (which in some cases even makes sense), so whenever developer decides that an update needs to make more money – he has to release a new app. So yeah, Atebits wants everyone to pay for Tweetie 2 – doesn’t matter, if you bought original Tweetie a day earlier – you just have to.

Thanks, Apple.

Still, that was not the reason for my skepticality – not even one cent in $2.99 spent on Tweetie was cried over later. The problem was, that this app had a hard task in convincing me that I actually need a new version. Come on, Tweetie rocked in its flawless work, minimalistic, Apple-like approach and perfect amount of features. Yet solid set of awesomeness was armed and ready for Tweetie 2, otherwise people just wouldn’t update. Stuff like offline support managed to turn me over to the dark side of spending money I rarely have. And as in case of Tweetie, regrettion is the last feeling I’m experiencing.

And hell, we probably made Loren Brichter a millionaire.

Good things

When I first touched this new shiny icon of Tweetie 2 – which is way better than previous one, by the way – I was expecting a lot. So let’s go. Quick logging in, and there is my feed. Oh wait, one more thing. Default font size is horrible – necessary change for 14 pt. Okay, keep going.

Feed looks just as good as previous one – what I noticed first was lack of signatures under icons on the bar and a shine, when you got unread tweets, replies, or whatever. Very useful and good looking. Navigation feels more natural this way, too.

Missing something? Well, no longer, thanks to this shiny & cute reminder.

Another change, one that probably is my favorite thing in Tweetie 2 – new approach to refreshing your feed. All you gotta do is slide to the very top of the app, release it, and magic happens. No buttons pressing, just sliding. Feels very natural and intuitive.

I’d love if this idea was included in a standard way of refreshing data on the iPhone – like… everywhere. Imagine this kind of awesomeness in Mail.app, for example. Tweetie 2 is worth buying for this very feature itself. Bravo, atebits!

Oh, and searching within timeline, replies and whole bunch of different places. Lovely.

Nearby feature! Great job with this one – now using Maps to show you data by placing pins exactly where tweets are posted. Will probably get even better with Twitter geolocation feature on its way.

Now a huge one. Offline support. Everything you do within app while not connected to the Internet is remembered and posted immediately after you get online. And yep, tweets are cached too. Very, very useful especially with people like me, that have EDGE turned off.

That would be most of things. Also worth mentioning is noticeable speed increase – Tweetie was a performance monster already, Tweetie 2 got even better. Feels like every iPhone app should feel – waiting is a pain you won’t experience and crashes? Never heard of ‘em.

Bad things

This part is gonna be way shorter. Unfortunately, it still exists.

First, THIS. Way Tweetie 2 marks your own tweets is horrible – moving avatar to the right and lett the text flow on the left side with an incredibly small margin? Changes the flow of timeline in too radical way and looks ugly. What’s up with that? It’s definitely just a detail, but one of those extremely annoying.

From what I’ve gathered it seems to be mostly solid, but like any 1.0 app there are always those niggles that crop up at the last minute and make you want to kick yourself. They’ll be fixed soon.

Then there are problems ensuing from automatic loading tweets that are further back in time. Let’s take an example. Almost everyday, at the morning, between yawning and swearing on the alarm I find time to run Tweetie and check all the tweets I missed. This routine in Tweetie worked perfectly – when I wanted to move on, I just pressed ‘Load more’ button and… more tweets showed up.

Now it’s not really clear. Tweetie 2 shows up tweets you had loaded earlier and then adds newest. It gets confusing while browsing all those night tweets and there is suddenly a huge hole – between, for example tweets from 3 hours back (loaded at morning) and 9 hours (loaded last night). Hope you get what I mean. Hopefully this will be fixed somehow.

Aw, and I can’t turn multiple accounts off. Seriously not getting the reason for it. Probably most of the users are not even using this feature – because what for? Now there is always a link back to ‘Accounts’ on the top of your timeline. Too hot spot to put a button that is useless for most people.

Is it worth the money?

Yes. Big, huge, certain yes.

Whether you have already been a Tweetie user or have never used atebits software – $2.99 is already a low price for software on that level.

Tweetie 2 remains my favorite iPhone app ever, feels better than most of iPhone software made by Apple.

Looking forward to another Loren’s ideas. Now go ahead and buy Tweetie 2.