Reportage was WhereCloud's insanely creative iPhone Twitter app that let users "tune in" to other users' timeline -- like a radio station for tweets. I say was because Twitter's swerve away from the developer friendliness that helped them build their platform and their rapid acceleration into ownership plays that may -- or may not -- help them ensure its future has led WhereCloud to stop development.

Martin Dufort, who TiPb interviewed as part of our Developer Spotlight series two weeks ago, explains it was the the culmination of 4 changes by Twitter that led to his company's decision:

1. Twitter stopped allowing modifications to the timeline, so ads couldn't be inserted, and more importantly in Reportages case, their re-ordering to present individual timeline "broadcasts" could be seen as a violation.

2. Twitter's switch to OAuth and XAuth took considerable time and resources to implement. WhereCloud went with xAuth for the better user experience. (It doesn't force users to go to a browser to grant permission, then come back to the app.)

3. Twitter's subsequent switch to only allowing direct message (DM) access via OAuth meant WhereCloud then had to consider redoing authentication yet again, because Twitter clients require access to DMs. Twitter's timeline for the switch was also originally very, very tight. At the same time, Twitter for iPhone (made by Twitter) wouldn't be subject to the same terms, making it harder to compete.

4. Twitter's Director of 3rd Party apps, Ryan Sarver, came straight out and said developers shouldn't be building their own 3rd party Twitter clients.

Taken together, these are all Good Things for Twitter -- they get to control their brand, user experience, and user base, but Bad Things for developers who for years have offered alternatives that arguably helped Twitter grow. It's a Mixed Bag of Things for users who may get a more consistent set of official clients to use, but will lose out on the creativity and innovation that helped make the now official clients great, and could make the next generation of clients even better.

All of this has led to WhereCloud pulling the plug.

We at WhereCloud, innovated with our own Twitter Radio Tuner: @reportage. To this day, this iOS application is still unique and a very good complement to other timeline-based clients. This last requirement to move from xAuth to oAuth will force us to update @reportage again but at what cost given the iceberg will surely hit again.

You win Twitter, your strategy of squeezing 3rd party developers is working with us. We will not update @reportage to support oAuth. We have no choice but to remove it from sale from the AppStore on June 25th.

Stranger still, iOS 5 will include built-in Twitter integration and authentication, so presumably next fall Twitter developers will no longer need to use OAuth on iOS but the new iOS Twitter auth system. Does that mean they'll have to change from xAuth to OAuth now, then to the iOS auth before submitting iOS 5 binaries in 3 months or so? Does it mean cross-platform client makers will have seamless auth in iOS but have ugly OAuth on Android?

And which other clients might call it quits while we're waiting to find out?

[WhereCloud]

What are your names? Martin Dufort (CEO), Fred Brunel (CTO)

What's your company's name? WhereCloud Inc

Where do you live? Montreal, Canada

Where can we find you on the web? http://www.wherecloud.com

And on Twitter? @mdufort, @fbrunel, @wherecloud

What apps do you make? NFB Films for iPhone and iPad, YellowPages for iPhone and iPad (with more than 2M downloads), Reportage for Twitter, LolePop with iPad-driven LoleWall

What apps, other than your own, are currently among your favorites? Camera+, Path, Zite, Flipboard, Tiny Wings

How long have you been a developer? Martin: I graduated in 1984 and been developing software since then. However nowadays, my software involvement is very limited. Doing a bit of Objective-C and some Python/Tornado to support some of the applications we do.

Fred: I've been a developer as long as I can remember, started young (around 10) and graduated in 2000. I've worked in a lot of startups for the last 15 years, always being on the edge of technology (from 3D games to mobile apps).

How long have you been an iOS developer? Martin: Since the SDK was available. Fred: Same here.

Do you develop for any other platform in addition to iOS? If so, which one(s)? We do web development only to support our mobile initiatives, we also have done some Android development. However 95% of our work is on iOS.

What primary computer setup do you use for your iOS development? Martin: I have a MacBook Air with 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB ram and a 256GB SSD. Connected to a 24in DELL Monitor. Fred: I have the latest MacBook Pro 2011: 2.3 Ghz Core i7, 8GB RAM, ATI Radeon 1GB RAM, 512 SSD. Connected to a 24in DELL monitor. I also have a 23in Cinema Display at home.

What iOS device(s) do you personally use most often? Martin: I use my iPhone 4 a lot. I also have an iPad 2 but given that my MacBook Air is so light I don't use the iPad as much as I want to. Fred: Like Martin, my iPhone 4 is my primary mobile device. I also have an iPad 2 of course and I use it pretty much everyday. I also have a Kindle.

What mobile devices, other than iOS, do you currently use? Martin: Google Nexus One, Samsung Captivate S Fred: Martin is the Android guy, I don't use any of those, even though I've been testing them intensively.

What's your favorite thing about developing for iOS? Fred: The tools and the framework are really mature (after all, the foundation has been around for 15 years). You're pretty close to developing for a gaming console. You can make the best of the platform and make sure users have the best possible experience. I like that Apple is eating their own dog food, the way they design apps is always a great inspiration.

What's your least favorite thing about developing for iOS? Fred: The flexibility of UIKit could be improved a lot. You can see that Apple designed it for their own purpose first, and third-party second. It becomes complicated if you want to do things on the edge of the framework, but there is always a way to do it. That said, the same could be said from other platforms, it becomes very hard to make a UI framework flexible & performant in all situations. Apple is always about making compromise on the technology to ensure that the user-experience is the best.

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the iOS 5 SDK? Martin: The ability to sync content and application using a wireless connection. Support for NFC. Fred: Beyond the obvious things you can read in the rumors, I'd like to be surprised!

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the App Store? Martin: The ability for a developer to comment on reviews for applications Fred: Being able to contact the customer directly (or through a form within the App Store) would be very important, sometimes you get back reviews because the user missed something. Continue to improve the discovery of new apps (Apple should also begin to sort apps out, there is still a lot of crap in there). The user experience of the iOS App Store app is not my favourite, I think there is room for improvement.

If we were to eavesdrop on you while you were coding, what curse word would we hear you use the most? Martin: Calisse de tabarnack! Fred: Eh oh, fait pas chier!

What do you do when you're not coding iOS apps? Riding the road bike (Just got a new BMC SLX01) or cross-country skiing. Fred: It's summer! Partying with my friends, biking (not like Martin) and having good time in the city. I'm trying to keep a balance, but I'm kind of obsessed with technology, I just can't help myself to spend time reading and experimenting with new stuff outside the job (like I've always done).

What should we look for from you next? Martin: We are looking at providing a very interesting framework combining the team experience we put in all our projects. Fred: Yeah, putting our own iOS framework on the market would be our next move. It's taken from our experience building dozen of products for the last 2.5 years, as well as our experience in designing systems for the gaming industry. We like to call it the framework Apple forgot. As far as products are concerned, we're always taking some time to experiment with new ideas and build prototypes. So stay tuned!

Bonus Question: With Reportage, you created one of the most innovative Twitter clients we've ever seen. What are your thoughts on Twitter now trying to lead developers away from producing strict client apps? Martin: That is a very interesting question especially since Twitter is really trying to own the client application space. We are seeing this now that they have acquired TweetDeck and introduce new policies to access Direct Messages. This is putting additional burden on us to provide a compliant application. Not sure it is worth it in the end. But Reportage was and still is a very innovative and we tried to break the timeline-based reading mechanism. However the mind shift was too big. We even got a 2 mice review by MacWorld.

Merci Martin et Fred!

Following too many people on Twitter? Can't separate the friends from the freaks, celebs from the geeks? Reportage [$1.99 - iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch takes an innovative "radio tuner" metaphor and uses it to cut through the Twitter chatter and let you stay up to date on just who you want, when you want. And thanks to developer Wherecloud, we're giving away ten (10) free copies to kick the New Year off right!

If you want one, head on over to TiPb's iPhone Forums and let us know who you want @reportage to help you tune in to. In other words, who's the funniest, most entertaining, savviest, most illuminating, all-around awesomest Twitter account you want to keep up with in 2010. (And yes @ nobody! Get Twitter off my lawn! is a perfectly fine answer, and so is @theiphoneblog -- but neither will help ya win!).

Note: Promo codes are only valid in the US App Store, so make sure you have a US App Store account if you want a chance to get a code! We're picking 10 at random on Sunday night, 12 midnight ET. One entry per user. Etc.

iPhone Twitter clients are best in class, point finale, but no one client can be great at everything which is why specialty Twitter apps like Reportage 1.5 [$1.99 - iTunes link] can be so valuable.

While the original Reportage impressed by virtue of concept alone, it had a few rough edges overall. Reportage 1.5 addresses those, baking in good browsing and replying to go along with the great reading.

If you ever find yourself getting lost in the timeline, following too many people who make too many tweets, Reportage and its "radio tuner" metaphor can be a great way to find just what you're looking for. If you check it out, let us know what you think.

Screen shots after the break!

Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they're iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they're fair game.

So who's on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad's Pick: Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor.

This game is a blast! You play a spider who's goal is to make it to the end of several levels from the lawn to closets. You can crawl anywhere on screen, jump with a swipe of you finger and create webs by creating a geometric pattern! The reason I like this game is that it is unique and fun! Catching bugs and finding the secret passages are a blast. The music is good, but gets a little repetitive. If you are in the mood for something different, give Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor a try! [$2.99 - iTunes link]

James' Pick: SportsTap

SportsTap is a free application that allows you to keep up with the latest sports news and scores. The app also utilizes Push Notifications to alert you when your favorite team starts a game, every time there is a score update, and when the game is complete. A necessity for any sports fan who can't watch the game! [Free - iTunes link]

Jeremy's Pick: Zombies & Me

Electronic Arts has put together this fun little game that is perfect for "killing" a few minutes out of your day. At $.99 it really is a quality game that's worth picking up. Did I mention you blow up zombies? [$0.99 - iTunes link]

Justin's Pick: The Weather Channel

With hurricane season starting to kick into gear with the first named storm this is definitely an app I want to have handy. I've used this app for a while and it has come a long way since the early versions. You can view radar, watch videos, check severe weather alerts, and much more. The only thing missing that I wish it had, especially for hurricane season, is push alerts for severe weather updates. [Free - iTunes link]

Rene's Pick: Reportage

What with Twitter once again going up and down faster than App Store rejection policies, I've found myself using Reportage to "tune in" to the people I follow so I can get updates in between the echoing silence of the great, not-even-whale-failing Twitter outages. The concept remains as specialized as it is killer, and if you want to read your way through different Twitter users, I'm hard pressed to think of a better paradigm than Reportage. [$3.99 - iTunes link]

Your Pick?

You're part of team TiPb too, so what's your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us -- and everyone -- know in the comments!

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...

World View

Reportage is a single account Twitter client, so the setup is simple enough.

Once you're done and enter -- or subsequently launch Reportage -- you're placed into World view and presented with iPhone home screen-sized icons of the people you're following, badged with the number of new tweets they've made since last you checked. The icons seem to be sorted by how recently they've tweeted, and only those that have tweeted fairly recently are shown.

There's a refresh button top-right you can hit to update, at which point a a golden-yellow, highly contrasting status bar drops down at the top to give you visual reassurance something is really happening, and in a very nice touch, the icons animate as they fly around to re-order themselves.

Tap on an icon and you get a list view of that person's tweets along with @mentions from people you also follow (with avatar for easy visual separation). If they've @mentioned you, it's highlighted in green. A more button at the end does just what more buttons at the end tend to do.

The most interesting UI concept is found at the bottom of the list: the manifestation of the above-mentioned "radio tuner" -- the other active user icons arrange themselves in a horizontal band and you can flick through them, a vertical band just like an old-style radio, indicating which one is currently tuned in. To highlight attention to UI detail, if you flick to a point in-between two icons, Reportage will drift on or back and center itself on the closest one.

Needless to say, you then get the newly "tuned" person's tweet list.

Profile View

Tap on a tweet and you get that user's name, follower count, and location along with the contents of the tweet and a date stamp.

I didn't see nor could I find any "in reply to" indicator or button to allow tracing back through the reply train, which is something I personally do quite often but doesn't really fit the "radio tuner" metaphor. Also, no indicator of which client was used to post the tweet, which is something that admittedly only client aficionados may miss.

If an @mention is in the tweet, tapping it brings up a webview of that user's twitter.com/[username] page which is a tad disjointing. It would be nice if that could stay part of the Reportage user experience.

Tapping on an avatar (presented if the user is in your current World view) will take you to the Reportage profile page, however.

Tapping the small info icon at the bottom right brings up a screen displaying fuller stats, including followers, following, and updates, Twitter bio, homepage, etc. as well as a Follow/Unfollow toggle.

Interestingly, there's also a Mute/Unmute toggle, which nicely fits the radio metaphor. Muted users are still displayed everywhere I could see, however an icon overlay shows that they've been muted. (I'm tempted to use the feature just for tweeting screenshots, however...)

Along the bottom are options to reply, resend (which uses the RT/re-tweet rather than via approach), message (direct message/DM), and star/unstar.

Star, which might be confused with Twitter's own public "favorite" system, in Reportage allows you to favorite a user. Favored users get a star icon overlay and seem to become sticky in the World view so they don't disappear if they've become tweeting slackers, momentarily or otherwise. It also gives them a place on the separate Star View screen we'll get to later.

Composing Tweets

Heading back to the World view, the "compose new tweet" icon is top left and provides exactly the needed typing, location, picture adding, and trashing (clearing current contents) functionality you need.

Star View

Tabs along the bottom let you switch from Wold view to other views. Next in line is the aforementioned Star view, which is identical but contains only your Starred, or favored, twitter users.

At this point it's important to remember that caveat about users only tending to exist if they're in the World view. Combined with @mention links going to webviews rather than in-Reportage pages, it makes adding less-frequent twitter uses a challenge. For example, I wanted to add Dieter to my Star view -- and while I may be the archetypal "dumb user" -- I just couldn't find a way to do it other than to wait and see if he'd pop up in my World view eventually.

Those who appreciate the concept of groups if not their complexity might find the Star view suits their needs very well.

Local view

Next along is Local view, which provides a list of location-based tweets within a user-selectable 1, 5, or 15 miles.

Me view

Last is your own [Username], or Me view. Tapping on your own view gives you a list of your recent tweets interleaved with @mentions sent in your general direction.

A Public/Private button lets you toggle to direct messages rather than @mentions. Somewhat confusingly to me at least, the dark rather than light button represents the current state, and labels not withstanding, hitting either button at any time switches between the two states. However, DMs are distinguished by a purple/burgundy color rather than green color so it's apparent enough which type you're looking at.

Again here, Reportage seems to limit you to users currently in your World view. Dieter, for example, @mentioned me yesterday wasn't there, while someone more active who hadn't @mentioned me for 5 days was.

Note, you can exit Reportage, go to Settings > Reportage > Filter and change the World filter anywhere from 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, or none (no filtering). This didn't expand the amount of users in my World view, however, but it did seem to increase the amount of @mentions in my [username] view. I still couldn't get to Dieter, though, as the "more" loading stopped going back as far (12 hours only). My conclusion: Reportage doesn't much care for Dieter.

(Joking, of course. We have every confidence wherecloud is working to address some of this -- as appropriate to their app's focus -- in an update release.)

Conclusion

So this Quick App turned into anything but. Sorry for that. Blame Reportage for engaging my Twitter geek. Now, I can't help coming back to Birdhouse by way of comparison. In Reportage we have another innovative take on a specialized, focused Twitter application designed to address the shortcomings of general purpose clients.

With the "radio tuner" metaphor, in keeping with Gruber's Design Playground theory, Reportage works amazingly well at presenting and navigating current views of the Twitter users you follow, all wrapped up in a startlingly good UI.

Can't wait to see where wherecould goes with it next.