Another of the big Apple Design Award winners at the WWDC last week, in the Best iPhone Social Networking Application category – was Twitterific, the iPhone beta version of the hugely popular Mac desktop Twitter client program.
The beta version of Twitterific for the iPhone already sounds very capable and powerful. Here’s just part of the award blurb’s description of the program:
Designed specifically for iPhone, Twitterrific provides both high and low density views suited for different usage scenarios, one-handed operation optimizable for right or left-handed users, and an attractive and polished user interface that feels at home on iPhone. Twitterrific uses iPhone OS technologies extensively including Core Location to integrate geographic location and help people communicate their whereabouts …
iPhone Central also ran a recent article providing lots more good background on what we can look forward to from Twitterific when it comes to the iPhone.
On the desktop, Twitterrific is more of a peripheral app: one that pops up while you’re working on other things, but primarily resides in the background. On the iPhone, however, it’s a foreground experience: when you’re checking your tweets, you’re not doing anything else. The design of the app takes all of that into account, and deals with it admirably.
As with the desktop client, screennames and hyperlinks are tappable, allowing you to easily reply to a tweet or visit a link. Double-tapping a tweet shows you a bigger version of that tweet for easier reading, but still allows you to scroll up and down through your tweet list. A set of large buttons sit beneath the tweet for contextional actions you might want to take, like replying to it, favoriting it, viewing user info, etc.
Posting tweets is easy too: just hit a button and the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard pops up. Additional buttons on the bar above the keyboard let you take advantage of certain additional features: taking a picture with the camera and posting a link to it, for example, or adding your your current location. There’s also a button that toggles between replying to another tweet or sending a direct message to the currently selected person. There’s even an integrated mini-browser in the application for opening links from others’ tweets; it even immediately expands compressed URLs tha
t use services like TinyURL.
That really is sounding excellent and very well thought out. Seems like Twitteriffic should be a joy to use and should pack some really slick features as well. It’s also very interesting to hear that it is incorporating some location-aware tricks up its sleeves.
After reading up on the Twitterific iPhone client, I’ve been making an effort to use it on the Mac desktop for the last several days – just to start getting a little ‘primed’ for maybe getting friendly with it on the iPhone in a few weeks.
Given the huge name recognition value of Twitterific, if it comes out as polished and sharp as it sounds like it will, I think the jailbreak-style Twitter apps (things like Twinkle and Mobile Twitter) are going to have their work cut out for them. I wonder whether any of them will be up for the fight …
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