If you use twitter, you are probably already aware that there are a wealth of "clients" that you can use in order to access your twitter account. Compared to Facebook, for which pretty much everybody seems to use the same default Facebook application, on twitter many people prefer to use applications other than the default official Twitter client. Personally I tend to change between clients on iOS quite frequently but at the moment I am settled with a great new Twitter app, Tweetbot.
Tweetbot
£1.19
get it here
The first thing that drew me to Tweetbot was its fantastic interface. It looks brilliant compared to most of the other twitter clients that either use the default iOS style theme or try and create their own style which mostly ends up looking pretty much horrendous (referring to Tweetdeck in particular). Tweetbot has a simple and clean layout that is a refreshing change for the somewhat stale appearance of iOS after 4 iterations. For me to consider an app to be great it must be wasy to use and have a fantastic appearance and in my opinion Tweetbot ticks both of these boxes.
Secondly, Tweetbot adds (or makes easier to utilise) features that are missing from other twitter clients, or that are present but much less obvious or easy to use. For example, if you flick your finger to the left whilst holding down on a tweet Tweetbot will show tweets related to the one selected such as replies to that particular tweet. I think this is a great way to access this feature and not all Twitter clients even include this functionality. Flicking to the right in the same way shows the conversation preceding the tweet selected.
Tweetbot also includes a translate feature which is useful if you want to understand users posting in a foreign language, which can be fairly common when reading top trending tweets.
Apart from this, Tweetbot offers the standard set of features associated with Twitter applications including support for multiple twitter accounts. One neat feature is the ability to set one of your "lists" as a default timeline, which is an uncommon feature in iOS twitter apps.
Unfortunately there are several things that Tweetbot does not support but mostly these things don't concern me (though they may concern you). Primarily, Tweetbot does not support push notifications which may seem silly for a non-free twitter client. This would be a deal breaker for me, but if you install "Boxcar", a free application from the app store this will enable twitter push notifications.
The app also does not support a landscape keyboard which I didn't even notice until I read it in the reviews. I very rarely bother using the portrait keyboard as I much prefer the landscape one but for those of you that prefer a landscape keyboard this is being added in the next app update. "Twitlonger" style services are also not supported, this being down to the choice of the developers and this functionality seems unlikely to be added in in the future.
In summary this app is by far my favourite Twitter client and has taken the place of Echofon and the official Twitter app for me on my iPhone. I can understand that paying for a twitter app that doesn't offer a whole lot more functionality than the free alternatives may cause some people to look elsewhere and this has been reflected in my rating. If you don't mind spending a little cash though, I highly recommend giving this app a try!
7/10
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