Twittelator Pro 2.0

• March 4, 2009

I have been beta testing Twittelator Pro 2.0 by Stone Design for the last two weeks and it has become my main iPhone client again, replacing Tweetie. I had used Twittelator Pro in the past, but found Tweetie to have a smoother interface as well as landscape tweeting. This 2.0 update jumps Twittelator Pro back into the lead.

The interface has been improved, and is much easier to navigate with Back arrows on most drill-down screens and a standard navigation ribbon at the bottom which you can edit. Landscape tweeting is in and works very smoothly. The real value for me however is in the hardcore features. Twittelator Pro 2 is the closest thing to TweetDeck for the iPhone.

Auto-refresh your feed: This is the best feature in Twittelator Pro. This means that I can plug my phone in on my desk, turn off Auto Lock and have my iPhone update my Twitter like Tweetdeck, dinging each time it refreshes. This is great for turning your iPhone into a dedicated Twitter device, and also good for people who keep their personal life off of their work PC.

Subgroups: Being able to watch groups of people within your friends list is TweetDeck’s killer feature and Twittelator Pro 2 has it. Being able to pull out different groups from your feed is a must-have feature if you want to follow a wide range of people, but also keep track of your core group of friends, your coworkers, etc. Subgroups are easily constructed by pulling names from your Friends list. This is the solution to the Twitter signal to noise challenge.

Unread counts: The counters for new, unread tweets in the Friends, @ Reply and Direct Message categories are perfect. The implementation works like Google Reader. Scrolling past tweets continuously updates the unread count until you have reached the top of your feed. Double-tapping the top bar jumps to the top of your feed and marks everything read. Doing a refresh and knowing if you have @ Replies and Direct Messages instantly is so much better than trolling through all three categories looking for new messages.

Load 200 tweets: Tweetie will load 100, but that’s often not enough tweets to reach back to the last time I read my feed especially on a busy day. More is better in this case.

THE NAME SELECTOR: Would you use an email client that did not have an address book? I can’t believe that so many Twitter clients lack this feature. Twittelator Pro beats most desktop clients for ease when @replying and Direct Messaging your friends.

Twitpic preview icons: great feature, every Twitter client should have it.

Proper threaded conversations: Tap any post-time with a speech bubble around it and you jump to the whole threaded conversation. Tweetie has this and I love it, but I don’t love Tweetie’s one-tweet-per-page approach which means 5 taps and 5 loads to read a 5 tweet conversation. Twittelator Pro 2 grabs the whole converation quickly.

Updated action list for tweets: Self explanatory, with better layout and design that is faster to use. We are starting to do a lot of different things with tweets, and I prefer the icons to the massive list of text buttons in other iPhone Twitter clients.

There are a host of other great features in TP2 that are high value that I will list briefly:

• validates Direct Messsages - warns you if you can’t DM (no mutual follow) and lets you convert to an @reply
• supports is.gd for link shortening!
• proper retweeting with “RT @name” at the beginning of the tweet! Why Tweetie, why do you use (via @name) at the end of the tweet? Who does that? Who has enough characters left?
• subgroups are awesome - not technically a feature

Hit me up on Twitter if you agree, disagree or want to know more.

Full disclaimer: I beta tested TP2 on a volunteer basis because I am a huge nerd for software development. Stone Design said I could talk about TP2 prior to its release but have not yet offered me any moneyhats for doing so.