Comparing Tweetie

Tweetie 2 was finally approved Friday and is now available at the App Store. Even if you have the old version of Tweetie it’ll still run $2.99 which is caused by the lack of an upgrading option in the App Store—so there isn’t much of an option for developers.

A small thing I appreciate about Tweetie2: the app’s icon color. One less blue icon on my home screen.
—Douglas Bowman (@stop)

The first difference you’ll notice is the icon. The two comment bubbles sitting on an electric blue background have been replaced with a single bubble on a light-to-dark silver gradient. I like the inner shadow, it gives the icon some dimension.

Pull and release to refresh is very addictive, not to mention clever usability.
—Jon Hicks (@Hicksdesign)

The refresh button in the first version of Tweetie was tucked up before the latest tweet in the timeline, hidden until you scrolled to the top. It’s still hidden in Tweetie 2, but now you just pull down to refresh. No need to lift you finger at all. It’s the little things, people.

You’ll also notice that the bottom icons lost their title and “Favorites” has been replaced with the “Search”. That’s fine with me as I search a lot more than looking at the tweets I’ve starred—“Favorites” is now found in the “More” (dot dot dot) section.

Two new options have been added when you slide from left-to-right (or vice versa) on a tweet. The first being the paperclip which is only enabled when the tweet includes a link. With this you can easy choose to open, mail, repost the link or read it later via Instapaper. The second new option is used to retweet, quote, post link to tweet, mail tweet or translate.

Another nice addition is the options when your writing a new tweet. The counter acts as a button and opens up a new menu so you can easily insert a photo your getting ready to take with the camera, or a photo already in the library, find the username of someone you follow, and shrink URLs.

The detail page for a user has also been redesigned. It’s now easy to find out how many followers/following the user has, how many tweets they’ve posted, and how many tweets they’ve starred. “Services” is a new feature that has options for other Twitter-related services.

Some more new features include an indicator that informs you if there are any new tweets within the different categories. I thought it was brilliant when I saw it for the Mac version, and it’s now included here. The sliding pointer is also a nice touch.

Don’t have time to that funny tweet you’re about to post? Tweetie now saves drafts so you can come back later and finish it off… Or you can save to Birdhouse, which is what I tend to do.

When someone posts a photo, you now view a small thumbnail before you click the link. It helps if your friends post random pictures all day and you’d rather not take the time to download until you see something worthwhile.

As for the features missing from the old verison of Tweetie, the dark theme is all I’ve found so far.

The new Tweetie 2 for iPhone is blazing fast, and a wonderful leap forward. I really miss the dark theme from 1.0 though :(
—Jason Santa Maria (@jasonsantamaria)

Overall the new Tweetie is very well done. Hard to find anything I would personally change, but I still think it’s all about personal taste. I enjoy all three Twitter apps featured on this site (Tweetie, Twitteriffic and Birdfeed), they’re all different and perfect in there own way.