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Posts tagged with "tapbots"

Tweetbot 2.0 Review

How do you improve something that’s already great? You keep working on it, trying to look at your product from as many perspectives as possible. If you believe in it, you can make something great an even greater product. Last year, I reviewed Tweetbot 1.0 for iPhone, the Twitter client many of us had been impatiently waiting for:

Tweetbot is the app I’ve been waiting for: an excellent innovator of the Twitter platform. My new favorite Twitter client.

Tweetbot is everything I’ve ever wanted from a Twitter app: it looks great, it’s fast on WiFi and 3G, it innovates in several aspects that have been regarded as “standards” from both users and developers for too long. Could Tweetbot be any better? Maybe. The developers could work on improving the speed of animations and refresh times as much as possible, or implement support for Readability and other URL shortening services. But as far as the Twitter experience goes, Tweetbot has got everything I’m looking for.

I have tried many Twitter apps in the past years, as you may know, and I’ve never seen a third-party developer as committed to making their client great as Tapbots did with Tweetbot for iPhone. Iteration. Tapbots listened to feedback, and managed to pull the old trick of implementing features without turning your original vision into a piece a software it wasn’t meant to be. With version 2.0 of Tweetbot for iPhone, Tapbots has improved almost every aspect of the original experience, adding features, bug fixes, and refinements that still make Tweetbot the finest Twitter client available on the iPhone. Now faster, smoother, and more intuitive. Read more

Tapbots Release First Ever #TweetbotSale

Tapbots, creators of awesome iPhone apps such as Calcbot, Weightbot, Pastebot, and Convertbot have decided to promote their fantastic twitter client by having a limited time sale of Tweetbot. Normally $2.99, Tweetbot has a sale price of just $.99. This #TweetbotSale comes after the official Twitter client for the iPhone was updated yesterday. Version 4.0 of Twitter has received much discussion on the internet in the last 24 hours. Cody did an excellent review yesterday that everyone should read regardless of your thoughts about version 4.0 of the official client.

Tapbots is hoping to gain even more users after many may be shopping for a new iPhone client. We at MacStories think that Tweetbot is one of the best Twitter clients available for the iPhone and if you haven’t had the chance to pick up the app, you get it now on the App Store for $.99.

Tweetbot 1.2 Released With Several Enhancements

Tweetbot, the Twitter client from Tapbots we reviewed here, has been updated to version 1.2, adding several features requested by users in the past weeks and fixing some of the minor gripes we had with the application when it first came out. Whilst version 1.1 focused on adding CloudApp and landscape support, Tweetbot 1.2 brings a series of refinements and enhancements across all the sections of the client that should dramatically improve the experience. For example, you can now undo retweets, and retweet from another account if you hold down the retweet button. That’s quite handy: not only you can delete accidental retweets, you can also retweet quickly without constantly switching between accounts. And if you don’t like Twitter’s standard retweets, Tweetbot 1.2 has an option to send old “quote style” retweets.

Tweetbot 1.2 introduces absolute and relative timestamps, Google/Instapaper Mobilizer support for when you need to strip away all the clutter from a webpage and read it in a text-only view, as well as integration with Bitly.Pro for those who keep a custom domain on the popular link shortening service. Besides the new great user & hashtag picker from the compose view (make sure to check out the animations), short link geeks should be happy to know Tweetbot 1.2 has support for custom API endpoints. Other features in this update include:

  • Pinboard support in the read later options
  • Pikchur image upload support
  • Tapping on a success/failure message dismisses it instantly
  • Added @username/listname for followed lists

Tweetbot 1.2 is available now at $1.99 on the App Store.

Tweetbot 1.1 Released: Landscape Mode, CloudApp, Fixes

If you read my original Tweetbot for iPhone review, you know it’s a great Twitter client I’m in love with. Over the past weeks I had the chance to try out an early version of Tweetbot 1.1, released today in the App Store, and once again Tapbots has managed to fit so many features into the app it’d be hard at this point to think of anything that didn’t find its way into Tweetbot. Version 1.1 introduces the much requested support for landscape mode, but there’s a catch: considering the portrait nature of the iPhone, landscape only works in three sections: compose window, for those who like to type with a larger keyboard; media, to view photos in landscape; web, to have a broader view of web pages. It makes sense to not offer landscape support in the timeline – you’d have to give up on viewing a certain amount of tweets in horizontal orientation, plus, let’s face it, it would just look weird. So landscape it is, but only for some sections of the app.

Tweetbot 1.1 is also rich in additions to the main experience. The app’s got new user and hashtag buttons added to the compose screen, to make it easier to include people of specific keywords in a tweet. The hashtag picker has been improved as well, if you’re into following Twitter trends, or have a set of tags you use often. More importantly, photos and videos can now be uploaded to CloudApp, meaning the service is not only being used for URL shortening anymore. In the timeline, Tapbots has fixed the location stuff to display more accurate locations and moved the “tweet gap” bar above old tweets, instead of below. I’m not sure I like the new gap bar better, but perhaps it’ll keep growing on me over the next weeks.

Overall, Tweetbot 1.1 builds on the excellent foundation of version 1.0 to deliver a powerful Twitter client that’s heavily based on Tapbots’ custom style, but it’s accessible for anyone who’s never used a Tapbots app before. The app is propagating now in the App Store, so check for updates in iTunes in a few minutes if it isn’t out for you yet.

Tweetbot for iPhone Review

 

I remember when I bought my first iPhone, Twittelator was the first Twitter client I downloaded from the App Store. Back then I wasn’t writing for MacStories, and I didn’t know about Loren Brichter’s Tweetie. I used Twittelator for months: it was a great app that had everything I needed. I saw no point in switching to another application, let alone start browsing the App Store looking for alternatives. Twitter was a young platform in the middle of expansion with lots of downtime issues, there were no lists or location features and the concept of “retweets” was just taking off thanks to the initiative of some users not affiliated with Twitter at all. For what I had to do, Twittelator was fine. Then I started MacStories, and the hunt for more compelling, alternative, different Twitter apps began.

Twitterrific came after Twittelator for me. I used it for a couple of months and then finally purchased Tweetie – which had seen a terrific rise in popularity thanks to an elegant UI design, a fast engine and a simple, yet powerful set of features. I fell in love with Tweetie: it was stable, fast, intuitive, continually updated. It received the support of the entire Apple community, and it quickly became a standard among iPhone geeks to have Tweetie on a device’s homescreen. The rest is history: Tweetie 2 shipped and revolutionized the ecosystem with pull to refresh, gestures, a refreshed interface and, overall, the richest feature set available on the market. In the meantime, Twitter as a platform was growing to accommodate more users, more servers and – as a side effect to media starting to use the service to deliver news – more responsibilities. Without going back through all the changes that happened at Twitter HQ between 2009 and 2010, you might remember when the company announced they were buying Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and putting him in the position of lead mobile developer. Twitter rebranded the app as “Twitter for iPhone”, Tweetie 2 for Mac disappeared from our radars to eventually come back as Twitter for Mac. Twitter as a company has changed (so much that they don’t even want too many unofficial clients anymore), but the core concept of the service stays the same: it’s all about sharing content in real time. That hasn’t changed at all. If anything, it got better. Read more

Calcbot: A Beautiful New Take on Calculators - For iPhone & iPad

Tapbots are well known for making incredible applications: they look incredible, they’re incredibly useful. Pastebot is one of my most used iPhone apps, and the recent Retina Display update made it even better. Convertbot makes converting units fun and simple. Weightbot - I wish I’ll be able to use it someday. Thing is, no one gets custom UIs as right as Mark Jardine does. Period.

There was so much hype about Tapbots’ new projects. This review is not about Tweetbot, and I guess we’ll have to wait for their much-requested Twitter client for a while. The folks over at Tapbots have just released a brand new application for iPhone and iPad, and before you hold your breath for something incredibly complex and game-changing - Calcbot is a “just” a simple calculator.

But it’s the best calculator app I’ve ever had on my iPhone. And iPad. And it’s not sitting on both my home screens.

Read more