New iPhone Apps: TweetDeck
TweetDeck “ one of, or the, most popular desktop Twitter apps “ has now got an iPhone app companion. It launched last night, it ‘s free, and a lot of folks are very excited about it.
I have to admit, I ‘m not as excited as others “ largely because I tried the desktop apps a few times and it never grabbed me. I never got into creating and using groups, which let you properly take advantage of its powerful columns feature. I ‘m sure if I used these I ‘d be more jazzed up about the iPhone app.
Here are some of TweeDeck for iPhone ‘s features:
- Manage multiple Twitter accounts
- View all tweets in real time
- View notifications for new tweets received
- Use columns to create your personal dashboard
- Sync with your existing TweetDeck columns
- Create groups to easily follow all your friends
- Share photos with Twitpic and YFrog
- Shorten and share links with your favorite URL shortener
- Follow and un-follow people
- Shake your phone to refresh columns
That ‘s a good list. One of my main problems with TweetDeck “ on both the desktop and the iPhone “ is the interface. It just feels too busy and cluttered, and hence not friendly, to me. I much prefer the UIs in Twitterrific and Tweetie.
I haven ‘t spent much time with the iPhone app yet though. I ‘m going to try it out a little more “ as I ‘m a sucker for Twitter apps, and I want to give the groups thing a try at some point.
What do you all think of TweetDeck? What are your favorite iPhone Twitter apps?
I really enjoy using the desktop tweetdeck because of its UI so I'm thrilled with the iPhone app which will probably replace twitterfon as my app of choice.
The sync feature is a rare and useful feature for those of us who tweet at home then go out and would love to take our settings and stuff with us.
The group feature is also good for me cos I have a FAVE group of tweeters I don't want to miss so to have this on the go is great so I can see what my friends are up to.
I noticed after I updated to 3.0, that now when I start the app a pop up window tell's me that I don't have internet or if I do it's REAL weak, even though I have full signal bar's and have 3G………
James – that's an odd one. I'm running it on 3.0 and I've never seen an error of that kind …
I like the Tweetdeck iPhone app only because of the group and sync capabilities. I do use the groups feature and so the multi-column support in the iPhone app makes it a lot easier for me. But other than that, I don't like it that much. I find the UI too dark, so wish that it was customizable. I wish it had landscape mode for typing tweets. And I really wish it had Instapaper support. From a UI perspective, I think Twitterrific and Tweetie have it all over Tweetdeck. Except for the groups feature, which right now, for me, is outweighing the negatives.
Lesley – that all makes good sense. If you use that groups feature, then that's a huge plus point. I need to give that a whirl. Agree that from the UI perspective it lags well behind the other two. Oh, and I also really dislike dark backgrounds and wish their were lighter options.
I also have a feeling that it may be easier for the other two to add features, than it will be for TweetDeck to radically overhaul their UI …
Alicia – glad you're liking it so much. I can see the usefulness of the sync feature in terms of the groups stuff, but for someone like me who's not a user of groups, not sure what else it needs to sync that is not already done by Twitter itself. DMs, mentions, followers, people you follow etc. should all be there in any good Twitter client on desktop or phone.