In my opinion Twitter is a mess. Tens of application for the platform, and all of them perform the same function: read about somebody’s else boring life or their diet. No, no don’t get me wrong, i don’t hate Twitter as a platform, but why do there have to be so many 3rd party clients if they all do the same thing? Like i said yesterday, my on-the-go Twitter needs are minimal so, on my iPhone Twitter (ex Tweetie ) is more than enough. Saurik on the other hand, is a die hard fan of Twitterific. But he is extremely unhappy with with the iPad version of the app.
Read his review after the break, typed on his not-yet-jailbroken iPad…
FSM EXCLUSIVE DEAL I am a die hard fan of iPhone Twitterific. In fact, I’d say that it is the most important third party application I have on my device, and in fact possibly the only one I use. Twitterific has super-fast scrolling and seemed to really get the Twitter workflow. The iPad version of this app doesn’t live up to that legacy.
Really, the iPad version seems like a complete rewrite. Almost all of the features for how to display the content are gone. Maybe I’m just being dense, but I’ve searched around the UI and the Settings app, and can’t find any switches or levers.
So, by default (and therefore by requirement) it doesn’t show the actual usernames of the people with their posts, which is the only way the website shows names, making switching between them impossible (as I am simply not going to relearn the names of the hundreds of people I interact with on Twitter).
Meanwhile, much of the flexibility in how tweets are sent was removed. Ever since Twitter released the “don’t show @replies unless you follow both users” upgrade, it has been critical to be able to mark certain replies as “not really a reply” (as you are replying to a single user, but on a general issue for everyone to see), which was easily accomplished with the interface of the iPhone application.
The performance is also horrible. Despite this faster device (and a design that failed to use the extra screen real-estate for anything but larger fonts), scrolling lists of tweets in the iPad version of Twitterific lags and skips. I don’t know if they lost the developers that worked on the original version, but this should not have been reimplemented.
Finally, the original version of Twitterrific had support for complex searches and filters, letting you select based on location and screen name, as well as supporting both “all” and “any” keyword searches. None of these features are present in the iPad version the application.
I /highly/ recommend that users try installing the iPhone version of this application, to experience how it operated. Even with pixel doubling, it is much more functional. This, unfortunately, means that the new iPad keyboard isn’t usable, but frankly the old keyboard on the new screen is not bad enough to warrant all of the other functionality loss.
(Typed on my not-yet-jailbroken iPad.)
[ this is a customer review on iTunes]
