Scopy, a lightweight Twitter client developed by Ignition Software, aims at providing a unique visual experience for your Twitter timeline. Scopy, in fact, is a Twitter app for iPhone that displays all the photos shared by the people you follow, inline in your timeline. The app doesn’t support regular status updates as it only visualizes messages that contain one or more pictures.
Once you log in with your Twitter credentials, you’ll be presented an elegant view of your timeline starting with the most recent update that’s associated with a photo shared on Scopy’s supported services. Those include the popular Twitpic and Yfrog, Plixy, imgur and Posterous. Each status update with a photo will display the image in a large thumbnail, with buttons to reply and “like” the photo, tweet time stamp and the original tweet. The app supports the “pull to refresh” gesture to fetch new updates and can load up to 200 tweets in a single session, configurable in the preferences. The interface design, as you can see from the screenshots, is very polished and elegant, plus it looks great on the Retina Display.
The “People” tab at the bottom allows you to browse a list of all the users you follow, people who are following you and your “favorites”, which are Twitter users who have been previously starred in Scopy’s list view. Tapping on a username will load a specific timeline with all the photos shared by that user. You can search among users, or run a default Twitter search for any term you want.
Scopy can also upload pictures with limited editing functionalities that reminded me of Instagram. The app indeed features a camera button that snaps photos and bring you to an “apply effects” window that includes effects like Noir and Vintage. It’s not as full-featured as Instagram or Camera Plus, but it gets the job done.
Overall, Scopy feels like something in between Instagram and a Twitter client. It lets you upload photos with effects applied to them, but it also wants you to browse your Twitter timeline looking at photos shared by the users you follow. It’s fast and good-looking, and it’s available at $1.99 in the App Store.
