I’m totally addicted to Twitter: in a matter of a few months, it has become my social network of choice, being a great place where I daily find interesting Mac / Web-design stuff I could share with my followers. Moreover, there are tons of Photoshop cool resources around, and that’s just perfect to me.
But anyway, this is my Twitter (remember, Twitter is what you make it!), and everyone knows that tweeting is a very personal experience, so I don’t want to be an example.
On my Mac, Tweetie is my favourite client: slick interface, stable, multi-timelines support, twitter search, dead-simple. It perfectly fits to my needs.
But what on my iPhone?
I have to admit that I was quite skeptical at the beginning about mobile tweeting: small screen, browser integration, lack of copy and paste..I did’t want to a mini-twitter, I wanted Twitter, just like on my desktop. With the release of OS 3.0, I thought that was the right time to go searching for some cool apps.
And here comes Twittelator Pro.
Power Tweeting Made Simple
Twittelator from Stone Design, is packed with hundreds of features. I would even say that it’s one of the most complete iPhone apps I’ve ever seen.
The interface is divided into 5 main bottom tabs: Friends (your timeline), Mentions (@replies), Messages (DMs) Settings and More.
Tweeting is simple: hit the compose button in the top right corner in the main timeline and start writing your message. In this window, you can also attach a picture, a video (only with 3GS) or some audio recording, insert an # hashtag (the app will remember your recurring hashtags in the future) or get your current GPS location.
In the bottom right corner of the composing window, tap on the smile to copy some unicode symbols.
Once written, tap Send and the message will be send to Twitter. You can also save your tweets as drafts, but I’ve never used this feature.
Note that Twittelator doesn’t auto-refresh your tweets by default, so you’ll have to tap the refresh button to see new tweets (including yours). Playing around with Settings, you’ll be able to set an autorefresh time for your tweets, either every 2,3,5, or 10 minutes.
You can even decide to play sounds on autorefresh or refresh only Favs.
Once you’ve understood how to tweet and read your friends’ messages, it’s time to interact with your timeline.
To do this, just tap on a tweet and another window will open showing many options: Reply, Re-Tweet, Private (DM), Copy Tweet, Email Tweet, Fav Tweet, Copy Link, Copy Tweet Link and Read it Later (yes, Twittelator has RiL and Instapaper support!).
Re-Tweet system is simple and well-structured: you can choose to display RTs as RT@, …(via@) or RT @ “…” and if you want to open a link attached to a tweet, Twittelator will open it through an embedded version of Mobile Safari (but you can directly open it in a new Safari window, if you wish).
I haven’t really tried Email Tweet and Copy Tweet, but the names are pretty self-explanatory.
Details and UI
To view your profile, you can either tap on the profile picture in any of your tweets or in @replies and choose the user you would like to get details of. Then, you’ll be able to view Tweets, Friends, Followers, Favorites and Location of that user.
Useful.
From a user interface standpoint, Twittelator Pro is pretty good: you can change the main timeline background theme from Gradient (my favourite, a matte one), to Raven (a darker one) to Dove (simple white). The general UI is simple and well designed, although it doesn’t show the magnificience of Twitterrific.
Last, but not least, the bottom tab bar is highly customizable: as you can see from my screenshot, I’ve managed to replace Settings menu with Subgroups, the perfect way to sort my tweets. Just fire up Configure menu and drag the icons you want into the tabbar.
Final Thoughts
I’ve only covered a 40% of Twittelator Pro features in this review. But this 40% is enough to make Twittelator stand out from the crowd of Twitter clients for iPhone. The price tag of 4,99$ is absolutely fair, considering that the application is monthly updated and has a great supporto from the developer, Andrew Stone.
An amazing app, together with Twitterrific, it has become my mobile client of choice.
You can take a look at a complete list of all the features here.
..and Giveaway!
I’m pleased to announce that I have two copies of Twittelator Pro to give away. (U.S. iTunes Store promo codes)
Entering is simple, all you need to do is:
- Post a link to this competition on Twitter (tweet this message: “Win a copy of Twittelator Pro here: http://www.macstories.net/ @storiesofmac”) ;
and
- Leave a comment here :)
The competition will run for 5 days, and I’ll pick two winning comments on July 17th 2009.
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Best of luck!
