TwitBird Review

Ever since I started a Twitter account, I have been battling myself over which iPhone client I favor. As you know by now, the App Store has no shortage of them either. As time goes by, developers must find ways to stand out in the ever-growing sea if they want to survive. Not many people are willing to settle for bland graphics and narrow scope. Just as with everything else we shop for, we want the most for our money. Why should our iPhone apps be any different?

For me there are three main factors I judge by: Features, Visual Style, and Reliability. Even some of the big name clients fail at scoring high in all areas, usually ranking well in one and falling short at another. After a few weeks of serious use, I think I can say TwitBird [iTunes link] has surpassed the others and ranked highest in all three of these categories.

Have a look at that! Very sleek, yet functional, and easy to read. The above showcases main timeline with the Dark theme found in version 2.2. This is my personal favorite theme, but its good to know there are two others that you could choose from, Movie and iChat Bubble, both of which mimic the look and feel of a typical chat window. Another cool feature of those themes was the ability to pick and choose your background image. I really favor apps that give ample customization to the user.

Now take another look at the above picture, look closely at the top tweet (mine lol). Notice anything cool? How about that "in reference to" box just below my @reply? SUPER COOL! That really helps recall what you were replying to, and it does so in style! Thats a huge bonus in functionality plus it tips the visual count too!

Here is a glance at a typical user profile, accessed when tapping on an avatar in the timeline. Not so much of a reinvention, but it just feels right with well chosen fonts and color schemes.

For this review, I purchased TwitBird Premium, which supports up to 2 twitter accounts, and inter-TwitBird push notifications. This is basically invoked if another TwitBird user sends you a Direct Message or a Mention. I didn't get many of these in my testing, which is a shame and something I hope to change with this review! As you can see from the above photo, each account will show a small badge of unread tweets/mentions/DM's and so forth.

After selecting an account, you are brought to the "Home" view which contains a break down of "Messages" and "Tools." MEssages further breaks down your messages in an mailbox style view, each box with it's respective badge as well. A quick scroll down will reveal many more "Tools" such as Drafts, Search, Nearby Tweets, Trends, and Saved Links. Other features include now playing tweets with link to iTunes and voice recordings. Being a musician, I like sharing music, however, I was hoping that TwitBird would also include the cover art in my now playing tweets. Perhaps this will be implemented in a future update. These are all major features that help push TwitBird to the top of my list, most notably the "Saved Links" feature. While there is support for Read It Later and Instapaper, a built in feature is a super nice touch.

Also under the hood, tucked away until needed, is two more features: in-line picture viewing and map link. When a user posts a picture, the picture is included in the tweet view screen (just tap a tweet to expand its contents), along with a small snapshot of the users geo-location! Very neat! Have a look...

When you click on "Nearby Tweets," a map loads with a nice fancy radar type graphic. As users are found, there avatars are loaded and placed on the map. Again, such a cool feature! Just brings a nice feel to the whole UI. This is a great way to find new "tweople" (people who tweet...) and even your own friends!

In my testing, I did have a few hiccups, such as double posts. However, I was able to pin this down to the fact that my iPhone is Jailbroken with a backgrounding/multi-tasking app running. Removing that app cured the double posts right away. Since then, I have not experienced any problems at all.

At the time of this writing, Boxcar [iTune Link] announced they now support all of the TwitBird versions (the free, Premium, and Pro versions). Coupled with Boxcar, TwitBird is my ultimate Twitter client.