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Posts tagged with "twitter"

Twitter Updates iOS App with iPad 2 Camera Support, More Bug Fixes

The official Twitter app for iOS was updated a few minutes ago to include support for the iPad 2’s camera. A pretty much obvious update considering the camera is one of the biggest features in the new device, and it didn’t take long for Twitter to support it. A new camera icon has found its way in the “new tweet” compose box; you can upload media from your library or shoot a new photo or video with the iPad and send it off to your favorite online service. The UI is quite nice, and luckily enough this update doesn’t bring any #dickbar to the timeline.

Twitter 3.3.2 also includes fixes: the developers have disabled “significant location change monitoring that was causing compass to appear constantly when in app” and the changelog mentions “bug Fixes from user reported crashes” as well. We hope this update fixes the annoying DM bug too, the one that kept your messages unread on each app relaunch / crash.

You can find Twitter for iOS in the App Store here.

Friends 1.6 Released: Improved Facebook Support, New UI and Search

Over the past months we’ve followed closely the development of Friends, an iPhone app by Taptivate that aims at changing the way you stay in touch with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Version 1.0 was released in December, and the developers quickly iterated with version 1.5 released in February adding Read It Later support and improved notifications.

Friends 1.6, released a few minutes ago, is another major update to the app that introduces redesigned sections, powerful search functionalities and completely revamped Facebook support. Friends can now upload photos to Facebook, and users can also comment on photos posted on Facebook. This kind of integration with the service was highly requested in the previous versions, and works just as advertised. Furthermore, the app is now capable of searching for friends across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – again, a welcome addition that uses a beautiful toolbar running along the top of the app.

Every post comes with its own timestamp in version 1.6, and every post can also be retweeted at any time from within the timeline. The interface has been refined and looks more gorgeous than ever; I also noticed syncing times seem to be improved with this latest update.

Last, Friends is on sale at $0.99 in the App Store. Go get it now, as it’s an amazing deal for a great iPhone app. More screenshots below. Read more

What’s The Next Step For Social Magazines?→

What’s The Next Step For Social Magazines?

Former Design Director of The New York Times Khoi Vinh shares his thoughts on apps like Flipboard and TweetMag for iPad, digital magazines that plug into your Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader accounts to fetch articles to display in a beautiful magazine-like view. As Vinh points out – and as we argued in the past as well – the next step for these apps isn’t optimizing performances or improving the design. It’s all about making the apps “smarter” and capable of playing an important role in your social graph:

I was thinking about this the other day. What if Flipboard was capable of looking at my Twitter stream and automatically find out the topics that I really care about? And after that, what about filtering articles belonging to those topics and visualize the most relevant ones in a top position? With the acquisition of the Ellerdale Project last year, it seems like the Flipboard developers want to bring further integration with the social graph into the app.

The process, however, includes a difficult goal: making sure the algorithm is intelligent enough to understand whether a user wants to read about content he’s interested in, or discover new articles and material thanks to the app and his friends using the same application. It’s a complex system, but someone will get there eventually. The iPad is only one year old.

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TweetMag 1.1 Released: Faster, Full Readability Integration

When I first reviewed TweetMag back in December, I called it the “most beautiful Twitter app” for the iPad. Lots of things have changed since then, but I stand by my statement: the iPad 2 is now available and Flipboard went under a major update that refined the UI and added Instagram integration, yet TweetMag still holds up as a gorgeous way to consume Twitter as a magazine specifically built for the tablet. There are some similarities with the iPad app of the year 2010, Flipboard, but with the recent 1.1 update TweetMag takes another important step to become the most beautiful alternative Twitter app.

TweetMag 1.1 is faster. The backend was entirely rewritten, and you can immediately tell the difference in speed – especially on an iPad 2. Images load faster, tweets are parsed in seconds, content appears within moments after choosing a magazine from the top “rack”. The speed issues encountered by several users in the first version have been fixed, and rarely did I stumble upon wrong headlines or non-loaded images in TweetMag 1.1. There are still some minor issues here and there (1.1.1 update coming soon?), but this thing is simply faster now. The new system that powers TweetMag definitely shows its capabilities.

Two new features in TweetMag 1.1 allow you to create a magazine out of your favorite tweets (and consequently add tweets to Favorites directly within the app) and link to your Readability account to create a Read Later mag. We’re big fans of Readability here at MacStories, and full integration with the service is more than welcome. You can add articles to your reading queue or simply head over to the rack to check out your Read Later mag – made of articles you have saved in your online Readability account. Instapaper support is gone, but it might be coming back in a future update. We appreciate the developers’ choice to support publishers by adding Readability right into TweetMag – which still grabs links off any Twitter timeline to present articles in a uncluttered layout with great-looking typography.

Other new features in 1.1 include a Featured section with the top publications worth following, and the possibility to add or remove friends from the app. TweetMag is a $2.99 purchase in the App Store for a limited time, and it’s still the most beautiful Twitter app, now with a faster engine. Recommended.

SoundTracking: More Than Just “Instagram for Music”

Last week I decided to refine my cloud storage and music streaming setup: I bought a Dropbox Pro 50 account and extended my Spotify subscription until September. In case you don’t know, I store my iTunes library on Dropbox so I can sync my iOS devices effortlessly across all the computers I’ve installed Dropbox on. But why using iTunes and Spotify together for storing and streaming music? For as much as I love Spotify – in fact, it changed my music listening habits since I started using it – not every artist I like is available on it. That’s why I care about keeping a well-organized iTunes library with the albums and songs not available on Spotify. This library is pretty huge and stored on Dropbox together with apps, books, movies and anything else that usually goes into iTunes.

With a 16 GB iPhone, the combination of iTunes + Spotify (which also happens to have an offline cache option) gives me the possibility of having any kind of music ready for listening whenever I like. SoundTracking, a new app for iPhone I installed a few days ago, aims at giving you the tools to share the “soundtrack of your life” and discover new songs shared by your friends, directly from your iPhone.

At first, SoundTracking might sound like an “Instagram for music” – that would actually make sense after all the Instagram alternatives and third-party apps we’ve seen recently, not to mention the Instagram for video SocialCam. SoundTracking starts from the same simple concept of Instagram: you open the app, tap on a button in the toolbar and share media with your social graph in seconds. In SoundTracking, that means you’re sharing the song and artist you’re currently listening to with friends using the app you discovered by logging into Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. But the similarities with Instagram stop at the basic concept, as SoundTracking goes really in-depth to allow you to not only share, but also discover new music and people with your same music tastes worth following. Read more

Spout Brings Kinetic Typography to Twitter, Facebook and RSS

Spout, a new app for the iPhone and iPad by collect3, aims at bringing the beauty of kinetic typography (animations made exclusively of words with different font faces, colors, and sizes) to your favorite social networks and news sources. Spout, available at $0.99 in the App Store, works exceptionally well to visualize news and status updates as typographic animations running smoothly and incredibly fast on screen. Seriously, this thing displays tweets and messages like in those typography videos you might have seen before on the Internet. It’s just so cool.

But is it useful, too? Not so much. The effect is really neat, but Spout isn’t anything more than a beautiful visualizer with few interactivity options. Sure, you can login with your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts to stay on top of tweets, status updates and RSS entries, but there isn’t much you can do to play with the information displayed by the app. You can load a specific Twitter user or search, enter multiple accounts and choose to display real names or usernames for tweets – but as far as “productivity” goes the only thing you can do is load a tweet in a popup and then forward it to Safari. I can see, though, how the developers built Spout to be an interesting typographic experiment, rather than another client Twitter might not even like. Spout will look great on your desk and it makes for a great demo to your friends, but don’t expect to use this as a replacement for Twitterrific or the official Twitter iOS app.

That said, Spout has beautiful animations and works just as advertised. For $0.99, you should give it a try.

Voice Brief: Listen To Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Calendar On Your iPhone

Voice Brief, an iPhone app that’s free until this afternoon in the App Store, aims at enabling you to listen to information coming from your social networks, email inbox and more through text-to-speech technology. Voice Brief, available only on the iPhone for now, can plug into Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, RSS feeds as well as Weather and Stock Prices to “speak” rather than simply displaying information.

How does it work? You choose the voices you want in the Settings (announcer voice for when the app switches sections, reporter voice to read status updates and news), set the speed and then you add new contents. You can log in Twitter and Facebook from within the app and set the amount of tweets and updates to fetch, manually enter RSS sources (there’s no Google Reader support) and set other details for your location, and so forth. Once the contents you need are in place, the main page of Voice becomes a dashboard with a summary of all your events (Calendar integration is also supported), social activity, emails and news. Hit the play button, and all this information will be spoken out loud by the app. Voice quality is good, sometimes above iOS’ default text-to-speech capabilities, sometimes below average iPhone quality. Overall, I’ve found Voice Brief to perform very well with regular English sentences, but of course the app fails badly at Italian contents and status updates containing very specific terms like tech products and acronyms (very common in my Twitter timeline).

Voice Brief is an interesting project that’s worth checking out, for sure. I can see some people using an app like this in their car while driving to the office in the morning. Go download it here while the offer is still valid. Read more

Twitter To Developers: Enough With The Twitter Clients

With an official announcement on the Twitter Google Group, head of platform and API at Twitter Ryan Sarver has told developers to stop building third-party Twitter clients that “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience”. Basically: no more unofficial Twitter apps that look just like the official iOS, Mac, Android or BlackBerry apps and don’t add any value to the experience. Instead, focus on different areas of the whole Twitter experience. Uh oh.

The move is quickly causing a reaction among developers on Twitter that didn’t expect such a response from the company. Basically, although in a subtle way, they’re telling everyone to stop wasting time trying to emulate the official Twitter apps because 90% of users are already using Twitter through the officially provided tools. On top of that, though, it’s not only a matter of choice: it seems like Twitter is really going to force developers to stop building apps by “holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service”. Some key parts from the announcement:

With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.  As we talked about last April, this was our motivation for buying Tweetie and developing our own official iPhone app.  It is the reason why we have developed official apps for the Mac, iPad, Android and Windows Phone, and worked with RIM on their Twitter for Blackberry app. As a result, the top five ways that people access Twitter are official Twitter apps.

Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter.  More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.  The answer is no.

As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.

Read more

Twitter Makes Quick Bar Less Intrusive With Update For iOS 4.3

Along with bug fixes related to app startup and location services, Twitter has met users half-way by stopping the Quick Bar from intrusively popping over the timeline as you scroll in version 3.3.1. Intended to update users on what’s happening the Twitter sphere, users were outraged at the inability to disable the distracting pop-over. Twitter has permanently affixed the Quick Bar at the top of the timeline, which you can scrub your thumb over to scroll through recent trending topics. Twitter isn’t backing down on a feature they claim user’s want – I say let individuals decide how they want to browse Twitter.

You can get the latest update for Twitter in the App Store.