Twitter Apps on the iPhone

by admin on February 8, 2009

In the spirit of Zen, this is a minimalist review of Twitter Apps on the iPhone. There are four Apps that I tested over the past week. I rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being Outstanding.

My review was weighted most heavily on user interface, then work flow, feature set, and finally price. Twitterrific Premium deserves a special note about its price, at $10 it’s just not worth it! It’s a very clean app, but missing lots of features. It takes the concept of utilitarian to an extreme, and there’s no reason to pay a premium for that.

Click the App icon to go to the iTunes App Store

Tweetie 4.5 $2.99
TwitterFon 4.0 Free
Twitterlator Pro 2.5 $4.99
Twiterrific Premium 2.0 $9.99

Tweetie is Best in Class: The user interface and workflow simply blew away the competition! It’s loaded with features, yet maintains a clean interface that is very intuitive. A standout feature is the ability to set up multiple Twitter accounts, and switch between them with ease.

Twitterlator Pro has this ability as well, but the work flow is clunky and flawed. At one point the application entered a state the forced me to restart. Twitterlator pro is like the Swiss army knife of Twitter clients, but it’s flawed UI and workflow make it tedious to use. TwitterFon is similar to Tweetie in terms of UI and well thought out work flows. It also has a good set of features, but short of Tweetie. For the price, it is free, you can’t go wrong.

  • I gave Tweetie another chance for the day yesterday. There is one thing I don't care for, it can only pull 100 tweets at a time, so when I wake up, there are more than 100 tweets missed, and it puts me at the latest tweet. I have to scroll to the bottom and then read my way back to the top of the list.
  • The ability of Twitterlator Pro to go immediately to the latest Tweets with 2 taps is very nice. But overall I found the interface clunky. For example, if there's a link on the tweet, it's almost impossible to tap in the content area of the tweet without being asked to follow the link. In some cases it mistakes a dollar sign "$" with a link. Also, the navigation between Groups and accounts seems inconsistent, and one time when creating a new account I forgot my password, and Twitterlator presented a text input screen, with no way to cancel or return to the application.
  • After purchasing and testing all the twitter clients, I prefer Twitterlator Pro. It has all the features to be expected of any twitter client. In addition I find it's workflow the most intuitive. New twitters appear at the top of the list. I find it difficult at times to "swipe" the screen without the clients loading a link, therefore I prefer to tap the top bar on twitterlator, which scrolls up one page at a time. Two taps on the top bar takes me to the very top with the latest tweets. I couldn't figure out how to do this on any of the other clients, which forces me to scroll up by swiping.
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