Tweetdeck Screenshot
Unlike Danny Brown, I use my mobile Twitter apps alot – at least as much if not more than my desktop ones. For a while now, my mobile application of choice has been Tweetie which I wrote about here. I was therefore very interested when I discovered that a Tweetdeck application was going to be released and I downloaded from the Apple App Store as soon as I could.
I’ve been using Tweetdeck for iPhone for a few days now so I thought it would be a good time to collect my thoughts.
The great thing with Tweetdeck for iPhone is that some of the features of the desktop version have come over to the iPhone platform. For me one of the top ones is that the concept of using different columns for searches has been retained. This is fantastic and even better, the iPhone and the desktop versions can be synchronised so that the same column structure can be used on multiple PCs as well as the iPhone. I love this.
It is simple to scroll through the different columns by either swiping the screen or by using the left/righ arrows at the bottom.
Columns Implimentation
One feature with the columns I really like is that each can be set up with it’s own refresh time. One thing I plan on using Tweetdeck for is keeping up with #chats – this is something that has been next to impossible on the iPhone until now. I’m thinking that the search columns of Tweetdeck, combined with the new iPhone copy/paste feature is going to work out really well.
Like Tweetie, Tweetdeck can handle multiple Twitter accounts, a feature I use often for my work and personal accounts.
So there are a lot of great features, but what could be improved?
Well, the first is crashes. When I first installed Tweetdeck it crashed on me every few minutes. The app comes with a Growl feature that shows the number of updates for each of the columns. Switching this off has largely solved the crash problem, but it does happen every now and again. I’m not worried – a lot of first iterations of iPhone apps seem to have this problem which gets solved as the code is refined in future updates.
My other main problem is with the colours. Unlike Tweetie which offers several screen colour options, Tweetdeck has just the one you see here and I’m not a fan. I’m hoping that the next update will give me the option to invert the colour scheme – I like to use a white background during the day and the dark would be fine for nighttime reading.
There are also a couple of missing features I’d love to see included – Trending topics and a local feature.
But I must say, for a first release is a very complete and usable application. I must confess that I tend to go back to Tweetie quite often, but I’m using Tweetdeck a lot of the time and enjoying it a lot. Nice job!
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