Last week, I wrote a post about a really slick app for jailbroken iPhones called qTweeter. qTweeter is a very streamlined and fast app that allows you to quickly update your Twitter and Facebook status. It doesn’t provide a way to read and respond to tweets and messages, but it does provide the best posting experience in my opinion.
This weekend saw the arrival of qTweeter for non-jailbroken iPhones, in the form of an app called qStatus. qStatus, from Gx5 LLC, is basically qTweeter without one feature that is unavailable on a stock iPhone – the ability to slide down from the status bar. Rather, qStatus launches just like any other app, but it starts up from the home screen to ready to type in about 1.5 seconds. That’s faster than every other Twitter or Facebook app I’ve used.
When you first launch qStatus, you must set it up to connect to your Twitter and Facebook account. qStatus doesn’t store your username and passwords like many other apps, rather it launches the oAuth and FacebookConnect authentication screens in a built-in browser window and has you allow the app to access your account.
qStatus also features integration with TwitPic and TwitVid for picture and video sharing, along with TweetShrink and TweetLong support. You can dedicate the currently playing song using qStatus, which will include a URL that your friends can view info about the track, and then purchase it is they so desire.
One really nice feature of qStatus occurs when you add a picture to your status update. Many Twitter apps simply show an indicator that an image is included, or sometimes they append the image’s shortened URL after your text. Sometimes I’ve added a picture, and then forget what I want to say about it since I’m not looking at it anymore. qStatus displays the attached picture behind the text bubble, so you can still see it while you type your message.
qStatus features two different sounds you can choose to hear for when you send your status update: a bird chirp or a whoosh flyby sound, or no sound at all. You can change the default background image that is displayed any time you haven’t attached an image to a message. You can also select which account, Twitter or Facebook or both, to update on-the-fly, just by tapping to toggle the checkboxes at the bottom of the text bubble.
qTweeter was my favorite jailbroken app, and qStatus certainly does not disappoint. Only lacking the ability to slide down from the status bar (for an example, check out my earlier post about qTweeter) is a restriction of Apple and nothing the folks at Gx5 can change. Otherwise, qStatus packs in the same functionality for stock iPhones as the jailbreak version does.
While qTweeter is limited in functionality, what it does do – update your Twitter and/or Facebook status with text, picture, video, or audio – it does very well, very quickly, and without the UI getting in the way. For those times you just want to send out a quick update without waiting for a more full-featured app to launch or risk getting distracted by tons of interesting messages, qStatus fits in very nicely, and at only $0.99 in the iPhone App Store, is well worth it!
You can find qStatus on the App Store here, and see more screen shots and a short YouTube demo video of qStatus on the Gx5 web site here.
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TAGS: iPhone Facebook apps, iPhone Twitter apps, photo sharing, qTweeter, Twitter
