Apps

If the iPhone and Twitter go together like chocolate and peanut butter, then for the most part current iPhone Twitter client developers give us many variations of the peanut butter cup. Tasty confections though they may be, and each unique and delicious in their own right, at the end they still tend towards variations of the peanut butter cup.

Enter Reportage from wherecloud [$2.99 - iTunes link], which rearranges those twin flavors like nouveau cuisine, utterly deconstructed and left for you to explore.

Too obscure? Okay, rewind. Reportage bills itself as a "radio tuner" for Twitter where followers are treated like stations on the FM dial and you can tune in (or tune out) to what they're saying, and spin the dial to move from user "station" to user "station".

It should be noted at the beginning that Reportage isn't a general purpose Twitter workhouse. There are tons of those already. Like Birdhouse, which models itself on a "notebook" writing experience for Twitter, Reportage has also chosen to focus on one specific concept -- pseudo-"live broadcast" of the Twitter users you follow.

Keep that in mind as we go along...

Last week the first iPhone (and iPod touch) app to feature nudity was live in the iTunes App Store. Technically, however, it was simply a change in the server behind the app -- the developer added nude images.

Subsequently, however, the app became unavailable. The developer first reported that their own servers couldn't keep up with demand for the newly nudified images, but it turns out Apple laid the hammer down on the "soft-core porn" app:

Birdfeed [$4.99 - iTunes link] bills itself as "A very nice Twitter client for your iPhone". That's pretty much spot on. It doesn't try to razzle-dazzle, or focus exclusively on one element or another, but what it does do is provide a quick, clean, interface to manage your Twitter account (or accounts).

Highlighted features include the simple design, local caching of already-loaded tweets so you can keep reading when/if offline, SMS-style handling of direct messages (DMs) to help keep the conversation flow, unread @mentions (replies) and DM counters, and time stamps to indicate where you last read up to should new tweets have since been loaded.

To answer the immediate question, no support for iPhone 3.0 push notification yet. Birdfeed's Twitter account says that feature is likely, but there's no time-frame yet.

TwitPic and yfrong are available for image posting and tr.im for URL shortening. (Where's the bit.ly love, and tinyurl for retro chic?) Instapaper is supported, though you have to exit the app and go to the iPhone's Settings app to find and set it up. This makes sense given Apple's preference for keeping Settings in Settings, and also because it's unlikely you'll have to do it more than once.

Great from a user experience perspective, when you get to the end of currently loaded tweets, Birdfeed automatically starts loading older ones. That's right, no button tap required. (The default is 20 but you can change that in Settings). To get newer tweets, however, there is the perfunctory big honking -- yet tastefully rendered -- button at the top of the tweet list.

For users who put capital letters in their Twitter account names, there's currently a bug those accounts to go missing from the app, but it's known and a fix is on the way.

All in all, Birdfeed is exactly as presented -- a clear, consistent, and enjoyable general purpose Twitter client with some great new ideas in a even greater UI.

More screenshots after the break!

Way back in the elder days of iPhone 3.0 Beta 5, there was some discussion on Twitter about how apps would have an incorrect icon, or would be missing an icon altogether. Since the iPhone 3.0 betas were private and not public, TiPb didn't post about it as that's just not how we play cricket. Private betas will have bugs, get those bugs reported, and hopefully have those bugs fixed by the time the software goes into general availability.