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Posts tagged with "twitter"

Want To Get Rid of Twitter’s Quick Bar? There’s A Cydia Tweak For That

By now you’ve probably updated your iOS Twitter app and noticed that the iPhone version comes with a new “Quick Bar” at the top that’s meant for letting you cycle through…the popular and beloved Twitter trends. Really, that translucent bar doesn’t do anything else but putting trends and promoted tweets (thus, ads) in your timeline. It doesn’t follow you around as you scroll, but it appears every time you tap on the timeline tab or switch back and forth between, say, mentions and the Twitter timeline. We get it: it’s annoying and partially ruins the design of Tweetie – ehm, Twitter for iPhone.

But here comes a solution: if you’re running a jailbroken device and you want to get rid of the Quick Bar, go install Twizzler now from Cydia, for free. It removes the Quick Bar and gives you control back over what appears in your timeline. That’s it.

Did we say it’s free?

Twitter Updates iOS App with Lots Of New Features

An interesting (and rather huge) update to the official Twitter app for iOS was released a few minutes ago, and it includes improvements both for the iPhone and iPad version of the client. New features has been added to this release as well, which unlike previous updates doesn’t only focus on bug fixes and stability improvements.

First off, the tweet compose screen has been greatly improved and redesigned to have a much cleaner UI and buttons to attach media for easier photo uploading; location info and usernames shortcuts are part of the redesigned screen, too. There’s even username auto-completion now, which is very nice on the iPhone considering one doesn’t always have time to type a long username on the virtual keyboard.

Trends have been improved, the app now shows trends for your specific location and there’s also a bar on top of the timeline called “Quick Bar” that allows you to cycle through trends. I wonder if there’s a way to disable it from the new Settings view. Twitter for iOS can also look in your local address book now to find friends that you might want to follow. This has been enabled both on the iPhone and iPad. Local trends, on the other hands, can be ignored thanks to an option in the Settings.

We are looking for new features and details right now and we’ll update this post as we find more interesting stuff. Check for more screenshots below, and go download the app here.

Update: The app seems a lot stable on the iOS 4.3 beta, and the bug that caused DMs and mentions to be marked as “unread” on each launch has been fixed. Finally, DM conversations behave like you would expect, too.

Update #2: Surprisingly enough, Twitter for iPad doesn’t seem to have the Quick Bar. Also, Quick Bar on the iPhone only stays at the top of the list and doesn’t follow you when scrolling the timeline.

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Twitterrific 4 Update Hides Dock Icon, Opens Links in Background

Twitterrific 4 Update

Twitterrific 4 Update

All hands on the Mac App Store! Get your update button ready for Twitterrific 4.0.1, a substantial update to the already awesome Twitter client that’s bringing loads of cool new features. Now supporting key commands for page-up & page-down, you’ll also find a “Full Metal Ollie” who’s ready to take on some of the client’s advanced features. Per your requests, you can now hide Twitterrific in the dock, open links in the background by default, and get notified of important mentions and messages through Growl.

If you don’t yet have Twitterrific, a free version is available at Twitterrific.com with ads, while a full version can be had for $9.99 on the site or on the Mac App Store.

Turn Twitter Noise Into Signal With Our Smartr For iPhone Giveaway!

MacStorians are incredibly Twitter savvy (most of them - we won’t discriminate if you don’t use Twitter), and for the power users who want to turn Twitter into a pure information feed, Smartr is a super client for getting micro-information on the go. Remove annoying Foursquare checkins, save articles for later reading, show page previews instead of links, and do it all with multiple Twitter accounts for business and personal use. We’re giving away five copies of Smartr to our delicious readers, and it’s incredibly simple to join in on the fun. Beforehand you might want to check out Federico’s glowing review, naming Smartr as, “Flipboard for the iPhone.”

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Tweeple Tap: iPhone Game to Recognize People By Their Tweets

Here’s a neat iPhone game for today while you’re waiting for more Apple news to come in and get you all excited about the event on March 2: Tweeple Tap, a free app by Puntrix, is all about the people you follow on Twitter, and how well you think you know them. In this game, in fact, you’ll have to recognize people by their tweets, which are displayed one after another as you select the correct Twitter user and keep on accumulating points.

There’s nothing else to do, just prove your skills in knowing the people you follow. You can get hints by tapping on a link on a tweet, or just go ahead and try to guess who tweeted what without even looking. Ok, maybe not that one.

Still: go download, it’s free.

Smartr Launches Web App to “Read Twitter” From Your Browser

I am a huge fan of the Smartr Twitter app. Smartr, in case you missed my review, is an elegant Twitter client that, instead of focusing just on your timeline and letting you tweet like other apps do, provides a neat way to strip away tweets that don’t have http:// links, and formats articles coming from Twitter in an uncluttered view. Sort of like Flipboard, but meant for Twitter on the iPhone.

The concept is simple: you log in with your Twitter account, and the app only displays messages that contain links to webpages. These status updates, however, don’t appear in the app’s timeline as the original tweets — rather, they’re formatted to be visualized with the article’s title, a thumbnail preview of the first image and a short excerpt. Just like in Flipboard, Twitter becomes a “news aggregator” of links shared by people you follow, with the app excluding unrelated material like Foursquare check-ins, pictures and tweets that don’t come with links. Smartr is a Twitter client that uses the platform to fetch content available on the web. Because of that, it also makes sure content is formatted for the iPhone’s screen with the possibility to display the original, unformatted webpage.

Smartr is launching a web version of their Twitter utility today, allowing users to log in with their account from the browser and read news aggregated from the service without using the mobile app. The web app doesn’t come with all the features seen in Smartr for iPhone, as it’s a simple, continually updating list of links found in your timeline. These links are given a visual preview with an image thumbnail and an excerpt, together with the original tweet and author displayed inline.

Speaking to The Next Web, Smartr developer Temo Chalasani says:

We built this web application because a lot of our mobile users were demanding a desktop Smartr client. The webapp is still in its infancy, but we hope to bring the Smartr experience to the web through this release.

Indeed the web app is very straightforward right now and doesn’t let you do much besides opening articles in new browser tabs, but I like the fact that there’s a real-time update at the top for news posted while you were reading. Check out the web app here, and go download Smartr from the App Store.

Photopod Aggregates Your Photos From the Cloud: Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter

It’s been rumored that with the next versions of iOS, and most notably the MobileMe service, Apple will heavily rely on the cloud to allow users to store media like photos, music and videos online and stream them at any time on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A move to cloud-based storage would allow the company to produce cheaper devices with less internal storage, and let users access personal content anywhere as long as an Internet connection is available at the same time.

Photopod, an iPhone app available in the App Store and developed by Dear Future Astronaut, wants to become the ultimate photo aggregator and manager by providing a unified interface to browse pictures stored on a variety of online services. Think of it as a way to access content anywhere (and download it) using an application that does everything automatically through a tabbed “accordion” UI that brings Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and your Camera Roll all together.

Once authorized with the aforementioned services in the Settings (note that Twitter will only fetch images shared through TwitPic on your account), the main screen of the app will display a series of vertical tabs you can expand to reveal their contents – namely photos. As you open a tab, a list of thumbnail previews slides down allowing you to see all the photos you’ve stored locally or online. Tapping on the share button in the upper right corner will let you select multiple photos at once to upload them to a specific service. It’s very cool as it also lets you upload pictures from one service to another, or from your device to the cloud. You can also download photos to view them offline, or enter a basic editing mode that enables you to rotate and crop pictures. Everything is kept simple and accessible. Flickr, Facebook and Picasa even get menus for sets and menus you’ve organized your photos with.

I like Photopod because it brings the most popular photo sharing services together into a beautiful package that’s easy to use, fast, reliable and intuitive. The app is available here at $1.99, don’t miss it.

Twitterrific 4 For Mac Review

My first exposure to Twitterrific was when MacHeist casually offered Ollie as part of their first nanoBundle, alongside great applications such as WriteRoom and TinyGrab. While the third version quickly grew outdated in part because of Twitter’s continual feature growth and the IconFactory’s focus on providing parity between iPhone and iPad iterations, Ollie remained perched in my menubar for quite a while thanks to its minimal HUD interface. It was this Aqua-less client that faded into the background as I went about my other tasks that was supposed to be a permanent mainstay on my MacBook. I loved everything about it despite criticisms of it being ugly or lacking features, and if I wasn’t as vigorous on Twitter as I am today it would still be perfect for simply reading the latest incoming tweets. Though times changed, and I shelved my favorite mascot for Echofon while Tweetie garnered droves of followers in its presence.

While the OS X version of Twitterrific remained seemingly stagnant, the IconFactory made a rather large push into the Twitter realm with the iOS versions we’re familiar with today. Starting with the iPhone, the IconFactory practiced bringing a familiar experience across mobile devices by simplifying how we interact with Twitter. There is no excess interface or useless presentation of information: the IconFactory replaces Twitter’s originally dull and now confusing web interface with an inline, color-coded approach whose design is recognizable across the Apple community. Macworld named Twitterrific the ‘Twitter Client of the Year’ in 2010’s App Gem Awards, and you can bet the IconFactory would take their award winning design to the desktop. Steve Jobs wasn’t kidding when he said everything was coming, “Back to the Mac.”

Today, I’m glad to say that with the launch of Twitterrific 4 for OS X, it has once again reclaimed dominance on my Coca-Cola bottled desktop.

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What Happens When Twitter for iPad Meets Youtube? YouPad

Call it a ripoff or “design inspiration”, an iPad app called YouPad, available in the App Store at $1.99, takes the experience and design elements seen in Twitter’s official iPad client and mixes them with Youtube. The result, as you can see from the screenshots, is quite…curious.

The FalconsApp developers claim that the app has been featured in Apple’s “New & Awesome” category, and while we still have to see such a section show up in the App Store, we do believe them when they say YouPad provides a revolutionary way to browse Youtube. Twitter for iPad was very innovative, too. The app seems to feature the same stacking panels navigation, the same background, the same sidebar with icons to browse different sections of Loren Brichter’s application. We can’t judge on stability and animations, but these developers sure have a thing for this kind of interface.

But hey – perhaps it really is a revolutionary app. If you dare to go ahead and purchase YouPad, it’s only $1.99 in the App Store. If you, however, don’t like Twitter for iPad at all, then you should stay away from this one.