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Posts tagged with "twitter"

Twitter for Mac 2.1 Released: Updated UI, Lots Of Fixes

Ever since I reviewed Twitter for Mac back in January, the long anticipated sequel to popular Twitter client Tweetie by Loren Brichter, I couldn’t switch to any other app. I tried other Twitter clients for the desktop and I even thought that the web app would be the best fit for me (to keep everything in the browser), but in the end I always kept coming back to Twitter for Mac. For me, the app is just so good, for a number of reasons: live stream allows me to stay on top with the latest tweets and news; direct messages have their own section and they don’t appear in my main timeline; gestures let me quickly switch between sections without lifting my fingers off the trackpad, and most of all they’re fast. Twitter for Mac already had a great feature set, but some people criticized the app when it came out for some design choices implemented by Twitter and Brichter that didn’t make the app behave as “normally” as other apps on the Mac. With Twitter for Mac 2.1, released a few hours ago, the application gets a facelift to finally feature a more native Mac look (just when we were getting used to the old one, but I guess it’s better this way), as well as several interface changes, bug fixes and performance improvements.

In Twitter for Mac, the main window has been redesigned to sport a native top toolbar with breadcrumb navigation for every time you dig into a conversation view, a profile, or a search. Just like in Tweetie 1 for Mac, you can click on the native toolbar to go back to where you were previously. Embracing a more native look apparently brought some welcome fixes as well, such as the fact that Twitter for Mac doesn’t follow you from space to space anymore. In the 2.1 changelog, the developers mention “bug fixes, enhancements and performance improvements” together with the addition of a console in the preferences for registered Twitter devs.

The biggest change in 2.1 is the possibility to “clone” any view in a separate window. By hitting the triangle icon in the bottom left or the Shift + Cmd + T keyboard shortcut, you’ll be able to open a conversation in a separate view, or your direct messages, a profile view, a search - anything can be cloned in multiple windows that will sit alongside your main timeline. This allows you to have multiple timelines on screen at the same time, multiple searches - I’m pretty sure Twitter power users who need to keep an eye on lots of things at the same time will appreciate this. Speaking of updated views, Twitter 2.1 also gets an updated profile window (with new tabs on top) and a refreshed DM view featuring the popular “chat bubbles” also seen on many iPhone apps.

Other changes have found their way in Twitter for Mac 2.1, too. AppleScript support has been implemented, as well as font size preferences; username and hashtag autocomplete enables you to tweet or mention someone faster from the compose window; t.co links now work much like the iPhone and iPad apps, being displayed as the domain they belong to (example: mcstr.net) without http:// before them. These links are still clickable, but when you copy them you’ll notice they won’t automatically append http:// to the link. I hope Twitter will change this, as it’s something that’s always bothered me on the iPhone and iPad too. For those who know how to unlock secret features in Twitter for Mac (it was possible in the first version with a MacHeist trick), we’re hearing the app features some neat things like pull to refresh and Classic mode.

From what I’ve seen so far, Twitter for Mac 2.1 is definitely an improvement over the last version, and the interface changes will be much easier to get used to this time. Bugs have been fixed, the app feels more responsive overall, the clone functionality to open multiple windows is just great. You can download Twitter for Mac for free in the App Store. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

Twitter Rolls Out Redesigned & Improved Mobile Web App

With an official blog post that went live a few minutes ago, Twitter has announced they’re slowly rolling out an updated version of their web app for mobile devices – this time redesigned to resemble the Twitter app for iPhone, but with a tab bar on top, and to feature more HTML5 integration. The web app allows you to quickly scroll the timeline, switch between tabs, check out your profile and even direct messages without leaving Mobile Safari.

We want you to be able to access Twitter no matter where you are; regardless of what device you use; or, whether you prefer to access Twitter through a mobile application or the browser. Today, we’re starting to roll out a new version of twitter.com for mobile devices. This web app allows us to provide a high-quality and consistent Twitter experience on high-end touchscreen devices – whether or not an official Twitter application is available. It was built from the ground up for smartphones and tablets, which have more advanced browsers that support the latest web technologies, including HTML5.

The new web app works on the iPhone, iPod touch and Android handsets, but it’s being rolled out to a small percentage of users today, with more following in the next weeks. Whilst the redesign looks good from the screenshots, there are still some obvious perks in using the native iPhone app, such as inline browsing for media and links or image and video uploading functionalities. Still, this looks like a major improvement over the old version, and we hope Twitter will be faster in rolling it out to all users than they did with #NewTwitter.

Twitterrific for Mac 4.1: Autocomplete, Visual Tweaks, and Better than Ever

If you’re a proud user of The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific (Hooah!), it’s time to check the Mac App Store or the menubar for an update to 4.1, which brings lots of new & thoughtful features to the colorful client. Introduced with the most recent iOS update, Twitterrific for the Mac now boasts autocomplete (which is done just as tastefully) and has updated its fonts to Helvetica, prominently used in Lion. Font rendering and especially scrolling performance will now see a significant improvement with the Magic Mouse, but that’s not all you’ll find underneath the new hood.

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TweetyPop Is Like Time Machine For Twitter

Released yesterday in the App Store at $1.99, TweetyPop wants to offer a different way to read your Twitter timeline and interact with status updates. While regular Twitter clients like Twitter for iPad, Twitterrific and Osfoora are focused on empowering you to read tweets in a vertical timeline which you can interact with to reply, fave tweets, or just discover cool links to check out later, TweetyPop resembles the Mac’s Time Machine in the way it operates: tweets are placed on a three-dimensional space, and you have to move the tweet “bubbles” with your finger to fling them off the screen and move forward in the timeline. Just like Time Machine, you make progress in time: only you have tweets instead of files and you can do stuff with these tweets, too.

The app’s got a traditional list view as well, but that’s not really the point. What TweetyPop wants to achieve – and I guess the reason why the developers created it in the first place – is being the alternative app that lets you sit down and explore Twitter in time. A scrollbar on the right lets you quickly move to a couple of hours ago or a just a few minutes back; big arrows at the bottom allow you to dismiss old tweets and load new ones, or go back in time again. The concept’s really simple if you’re used to Time Machine or Lion’s Versions. In fact, the app’s even got the same space-inspired background that you can’t change. Once you get the hang of it – you can scroll, move tweets around, reply, fave and follow links – you might want to check out the additional icons along the top. These buttons enable you to use Twitter’s usual functionalities like replies, DMs and favorite tweets, as well as lists, trends, or search. In every section, tweets are displayed as bubbles against a Time Machine-esque timeline like in the main page. This might be a little disorienting at first for mentions and direct messages, but I believe TweetyPop wants to disorient you, in a good way. It’s very, very different from anything else I’ve tried on the iPad in a year of existence of the platform.

I also like the fact that the app’s got some interesting options to play with. You can send items to Instapaper or OmniFocus, filter the timeline by “all tweets” or “new tweets only” and enable auto-play to let the app automatically scroll for you and create a slideshow for your tweets. The slideshow speed is configurable in the settings.

At $1.99, I’d give TweetyPop a try if only because it’s different. Sure, it won’t replace Twitter for iPad or Twitterrific, but it has the chance to become that alternative Twitter app that does one thing well and surprises you with its original ideas and interactions. Plus, the time exploration effect for tweets is just neat. Go download the app here. Promo video below.

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The “Re-Imagined” TweetDeck 2.0 iPhone App Hits The App Store

TweetDeck has today released its completely new 2.0 iPhone app that has received a “Hollywood re-imagining”, being rebuilt from the ground up to be “fast, flexibe and full-on powerful.” The update, which has been a long time coming, adds a number of new features and improvements whilst retaining the “guiding principles” of the original.

One of TweetDeck’s new and innovative features is the use of pinching on a column to access the columns’ settings so that any combinations of Twitter timelines, mentions, DMs, Facebook feeds and so on can be merged into one customized column. The whole user interface has also been redesigned, following the direction that their Android and Chrome apps have gone in, and of course it now takes advantage of the Retina display.

Also improved is multiple account handling and gestures, which although not extensive as those present in Tweetbot, are greatly improved adding the ‘pull to refresh’ and pinch for column settings gestures and general improvements in swiping through your various feeds. Finally there is built-in Deck.ly support, letting you write those longer messages on Twitter without hassle.

The 2.0 version comes after “several months of feverish work” and a promised iPad revamp of the app is also coming in a Universal binary “in the next couple of weeks”. In fact technically TweetDeck 2.0 is not an update and the old versions of the app have been temporarily removed from the App Store to avoid confusion. So don’t go to the updates tab of the App Store, it won’t appear there, you’ll have to download the new TweetDeck app from the actual store.

Jump the break for some more screenshots of the new update.

[Via TechCrunch]

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RockMelt Coming To The iPhone With “Desktop Sync” Feature [Update: Available]

RockMelt, the social browser based on the open-source Chromium engine that aims at enriching the desktop browsing experience with visual previews and Facebook / Twitter integration, is coming to the iPhone. As reported by Venturebeat, the developers – who have received several rounds of funding in the past months and are committed to making RockMelt the ultimate social browser for Mac & Windows, especially after the departure of Flock – have been busy creating a smaller iPhone version that’s not really a full-featured browser, but it’s focused on the “app edge” aspect of RockMelt. On the desktop, RockMelt features a series of vertical sidebars that display the latest updates from your Facebook and Twitter friends, or emails from Gmail contacts, and so forth. In the developers’ vision of today’s browsing, people are more likely to discover content through status updates from social media, rather than manually typing a URL or spend hours looking for news on Google. That’s why the iPhone version – coming soon to the App Store – will be focused on letting you quickly open the app, and check on the latest updates from your friends. You can search and browse the web regularly, too, but the focus is on “favorite feeds”, read later and most accessed bookmarks.

Most mobile browsers provide a similar experience to PC browsing, just with a touch interface and smaller screen. But RockMelt co-founder and chief executive Eric Vishria pointed out that when you’re waiting in line for a cup of coffee, you don’t want to whip out your phone and type in a long website address. Instead, you’re more likely to check the latest updates on Facebook or Twitter.

With Facebook and Twitter support, users will be able to send their own status updates, or check on links shared by their friends. These links will be previewed inline by RockMelt below a Facebook message or a tweet, and you can also decide to view them later thanks to the Instapaper-like “read later” option introduced in RockMelt beta 2. Last, the iPhone version will feature a “desktop sync” option that will allow you to sync your bookmarks and, we assume, read later material across the iPhone and RockMelt for the desktop. This sounds very similar to what Mozilla did with Firefox Home, and we’re looking forward to seeing sync in action.

RockMelt for iPhone will be available “in the coming days” on the App Store. Read more

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

Angry Birds Seasons Will Get “Amazing Update” for Easter→

Angry Birds Seasons Will Get “Amazing Update” for Easter

With a series of tweets posted on the official @RovioMobile account, the Angry Birds developers have confirmed to their fans that Seasons will get an amazing and “great” update for Easter. A preview of the new features will be posted soon, but if we had to guess we wouldn’t be surprised to see more eggs and some kind of evil rabbits. Angry Birds Seasons was updated in the past to include Halloween levels, Christmas specials, a Valentine’s Day edition and a green St. Patrick’s Day version. The update is expected to drop in the App Store before Easter (which is on April 24 this year).

With other tweets, Rovio is also suggesting Angry Birds Seasons for Mac will be released before Summer, and a huge update for the regular “Angry Birds” game is set to come out in the next few months, hopefully around May / June. Check out Rovio’s Twitter timeline here to get more details on the updates the development studio is working on. Honestly, we can’t wait to have some more Angry Birds in our hands. And with a new record of 10 million downloads in 10 days, I’m pretty sure the next updates will dominate the App Store once again. [via]

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Finally: Twitter Has Killed The Quick Bar

Following user criticism (an euphemism) and complaints from several aficionados of the official iPhone client, Twitter released an update to the iOS app today, and they have removed the Quick Bar. Kindly called “dickbar” by many users on Twitter in the past weeks, the bar used to appear along the top of the main timeline to show promoted and regular trends. We didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. And now it’s gone.

In an official blog post, Twitter explains:

Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.

Twitter also says the Quick Bar could have evolved into a full-featured notification system for mentions, direct messages, and more. I guess we’ll never know at this point, or perhaps in-app visual notifications will be implemented in other ways in the future. We’ll see.

The updated, Quick Bar-free Twitter app is available in the App Store now. The latest version also introduces bug fixes, and we hope the company is referring to the annoying DM bug here. The bug has been around for ages now, it was fixed in a previous update, then it mysteriously came back. It’d be nice to see that gone, too.