I lay my head in the guillotine with this post title, but I have to get this out of the way: If you’ve ever used Tweetie 2, you’ve used Osfoora. And while I don’t want to say it, the feature comparison is so similar it’s not even funny. So with this said, I’m going to review Osfoora as perhaps a re-imagination of Tweetie 2 – what does it do better and what does it do worse?
Osfoora stands out in its own way by implementing a quite loud icon-based menu system that connects you to your various Twitter tasks. While most of these options can be accessed from the Timeline anyway, having these shortcuts is one of the only things that separate it from Brichter’s creation.
The Timeline is similar to Tweetie 2, but with a few subtle differences. The first is that instead of a dock like highlight to your Timeline, Mentions, and Message icons, you’ll get a badge instead. Also, the Timeline is themeable from the preferences (so you can have black or white). Lastly, you can pull-down to refresh. However, Osfoora does something interesting here, because you can pull down to reveal an additional menu.
This additional menu gives you shortcuts to view your profile, refresh your Timeline, or “go way back.” If you’re wanting to perhaps re-read or catch up on information you missed in your Timeline, you can press the squiggly to go way down your feed. I wish, since they’ve implemented this, that you could tap the titlebar to go back to the top of the feed – like how Mobile Safari deals with websites.
While you can’t swipe across a Tweet to reveal a menu ala Tweetie 2 (instead you can hold down on a Tweet to bring up a menu of actions), tapping the username still brings up a similar menu. You can open links, DM the user, favorite, and re-tweet. Tapping on the user takes you too their profile page, which again looks very similar to Tweetie’s offering.
Composing tweets brings up an interesting menu of items to interact with above the keyboard. For example, you can add location or now playing information to your tweets with just a press of a button.
Ofoora also contains goodies you might all be familiar with: Drafts, trends, searches, a public timeline, and the ability to find users. Like Tweetie 2, you can also edit your user profile.
In the settings you can drastically change the look of your app by messing with not only your Timeline, but your main menu icons as well. I thought the defaults looked the best personally, but if theming isn’t your thing, you can also change your image, video, and url shortening services as well.
Osfoora is a Twitter client with a new take on Tweetie. By implementing a sort of home screen, it attempts to give you shortcuts to items quickly and easily. While I don’t know if I like this approach, the app does offer some extra functionality, and you can get your own copy for $2.99. [iTunes Link]
