Birdfeed – A Very Nice Twitter App For Your iPhone

Today, Birdfeed, the iPhone’s newest Twitter app from System of Touch, became available on the App Store. I have been following @birdfeedapp on Twitter for some time, anxious for some piece of insight about their upcoming new app, but they’ve been very good about keeping the suspense high. All their website said was “a very nice Twitter client for your iPhone” was “coming soon”, and also featured a very nicely designed icon. Based on experience with dozens of iPhone apps, the quality of an app’s icon goes to say a lot about the quality of the app. With an icon as beautiful as Birdfeed’s, I was on the edge of my seat to see what they would deliver. I am not disappointed.

Birdfeed has the usual set of features one would expect from a Twitter app today such as support for multiple accounts, posting images, saved searches and hashtag lookup, retweeting, and logging in using a secure connection, along with some unique features that help distinguish it and set it apart from others, such as integration with third-party Twitter services Favrd and FollowCost, being able to navigate reply chains, infinite scrolling with auto loading of older tweets, and Instapaper integration (including password support).

From the moment you first open the app, you’re presented with a very well designed UI, with excellent graphics and icons, and just the right amount of space between touch elements which really makes the app easy to navigate and control. Birdfeed feels very quick and fast, and moves between screens without stuttering or pausing, like other UI-heavy apps sometimes do.

Birdfeed has decided to use a home screen to navigate the various sections rather than a tabbed navigation bar at the bottom like most Twitter apps available today. They explain that this is to reduce on-screen clutter that occurs when you try to cram too many icons into a tab bar. While this has its benefits, it does mean that the most common action for me, switching between the full timeline and the mentions timeline, takes an extra tap – one to go back to the home screen and then another to open the mentions screen. I am not yet sold on this design choice, as I have come to appreciate the buttons most other Twitter apps place at the bottom of their app for Timeline, Mentions, Direct Messages and Search. Most of these apps also use a badge with the number of new messages overlaying the button, so you can tell at a glance how many new mentions or direct messages you have.

Viewing and navigating the full timeline is very simple, and reading tweets is easy thanks to a smart choice in the color scheme. Tweets are displayed in light-grey chat bubbles with the user’s profile picture displayed to the left, and replies have a light yellow color to set them apart. The chat bubbles also contain the time the tweet was posted, using relative time stamps (1 minute ago, 1 hour ago, etc.) which I have always preferred in any app. The default font size is decent but it would be nice if Birdfeed would provide a way to enlarge or reduce the font size in a future update. You can control the number of tweets Birdfeed will load upon launch in the Settings (20, 50, 100), but there does not appear to be an auto-refresh of the timeline after a set amount of time like many other Twitter apps. There is a Refresh button, though, which appears above the most recent tweet.

Tapping on a tweet brings up the Tweet details view, which includes buttons to Reply, Favorite, or Forward. Tapping Forward brings up a menu to Retweet, Post a link to the tweet, or Mail a link to the tweet. I would like to see Retweet included as a top-level option next to Reply and Favorite, and the Mail link and Post link buttons under a Share menu. I retweet a fair number of tweets, and Birdfeed requires three taps before I’m able to add my comment and post. while several other Twitter apps only require a single tap as they’ve made the retweet option top level.

Posting a tweet is very easy, and I especially like the way Birdfeed uses a little jelly-bean looking countdown bubble that slowly fills up with a blue color as you approach the 140-character maximum, and turns yellow when only 34 characters remain, and red when you max out. You can also tap a trash icon to clear the text of the tweet, or a camera icon to add a picture using the iPhone’s camera or using a picture from the Camera Roll. At this time, Birdfeed only supports the TwitPic and yFrog photo sharing services, though hopefully they will add more services in future updates.

For URL shortening, Birdfeed only includes support for Tr.im, though they earn extra points for including the ability to use your Tr.im account rather than just anonymous access like so many other Twitter apps. The choice of Tr.im and only Tr.im is surprising, however, since Bit.ly and TinyURL are the first and second most popular URL shortening services for Twitter users. This is an unfortunate decision for me, as I rely heavily on my Bit.ly account to keep track of stats for the links I share. Also, I’ve yet to figure out how the link shortening actually works in Birdfeed, since there is no button that I have found that actually shortens a link you type into the text field. Perhaps the link gets shortened as you post the tweet; I’ve not yet tried this to see.

Tapping on another user’s name brings up the profile view, which displays how many followers they have, how many people they are following, the number of tweets they’ve posted, a short bio, and buttons to view their recent tweets and favorites, as well as a quick way to run a search for all tweets mentioning this person. This is a very helpful feature I’ve wished other Twitter apps would include. You can also tap to follow or unfollow the person if you wish.

Birdfeed has built in local caching using the iPhone’s storage. This way, if your iPhone loses its Internet connection, you can continue to read any tweet that has already been loaded. Birdfeed remembers your timeline, and you can reopen the app later, even if you still don’t have an Internet connection, and continue reading previous tweets.

Birdfeed has built-in support for two third-party Twitter services, Favrd and FollowCost. Favrd is an interesting service that displays a list of your tweets that other people have marked as their favorite. I’m not quite sure if I understand the concept of FollowCost, which somehow calculates a cost based on how often a person tweets which is supposed to help you decide to follow the person or not. Birdfeed also supports Instapaper, with full username and password support. Instapaper has become the de facto standard for marking links in Twitter apps to read later when one is at their computer. For some odd reason, many Twitter apps neglect to include password support, requiring a user to leave their Instapaper account unprotected without a password set. Kudos to Birdfeed for supporting Instapaper passwords.

All things considered, Birdfeed is a very formidable app, and isn’t just the best looking Twitter app, it’s one of the best looking iPhone apps, period. The app performs well, never feels sluggish or slow, and provides the expected feature set as well as several additional features that other Twitter apps don’t. I love the design of the tweet bubbles, as they separate each tweet just perfectly without the color scheme becoming overbearing or distracting. All of the icons and graphics are gorgeous and animations between screens smooth. Though the app won’t replace Twitterrific as my primary Twitter app just yet, it has great potential to do so if the developer incorporates a few of my hot items, such as Bit.ly support, Posterous image posting, and an auto-refreshing timeline.

Do I recommend Birdfeed? Absolutely!

Buy Birdfeed today on the App Store for $4.99 (iTunes link). Give it a try and then let us know what you think by posting a comment.

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TAGS: iphone apps, iPhone Twitter apps, social-media