Twitter/Tweetdeck for iPhone - Review

It's been around for an age as tweetie but the guys at twitter liked it so much they bought it.  Why?  Probably because it boots its nearest rivals into next week and then shoots them with its app gun.  In the nads.

It's so easy to use.  Who doesn't love that little pull down refresh thing?  Like a fruit machine, but better.  It's also now free, previously costing 59p (imagine...).  Of course some of the free ones have ads embedded but not twitter/tweetie and it just makes life nice and easy, not over complicating the multitude of different ways that you can use twitter.

(Reviewing something called twitter that's for twitter is gonna make for some confusingly constructed sentences so for the rest of this post I shall be referring to it as, 'the shit'.)


(Not really, lets go with tweetie, k?)

So tweetie rocks because it makes life easy and makes the user feel part of the update process with the pull down updating thingy.  It's perfect for iPhone because it subscribes to the Apple school of thought and makes everything feel intuitive.  Which so many of the others fail with, notably the tweetdeck app.

twitter not very long ago

On my PC tweetdeck rules the waves like an aircraft carrier with a payload of nuclear armed Harrier jump jets ready to strike at all before them.  It just works and although they keep adding bits to it that don't mean a damn thing to me, I love the integrated facebook stuff and the multiple account access made life very easy last October for that thing I did, that I can not mention (@FionaKyle).  It keeps breaking which makes it feel all home brew, which I still love about it.  Call me weird, but this shit is free, works 90% of the time and looks pretty cool.  It's all black and shiny and once you make it silent, shutting off that annoying bing noise, it's a treat to use.

However the iPhone app, despite doing nearly everything the PC version does and syncing up with your PC/Mac app, has just got too much going on and is still prone to the occasional crash (I hate that happening way more than when it happens on my PC.  Yes I am odd.)  It's also not as simple to use, feels ungainly next to tweetie, and just isn't as pretty.  There's also the rather unfortunate, 'I can't see the DM's I've sent,' problem that never looks like getting resolved.

It's big brother is one of my favourite bits of software, it links up my social media life in cool and easy to manage fashion.  Now I can even filter things out if I want.  But the iPhone app is never going to replace Tweetie in my heart.

tweetdeck not long ago

Tweetie/twitter is an elegant beautifully designed app that does exactly what you want a twitter app to do.  If you have an iPhone and use twitter, it is an absolute must.  Go get it.  It's what your iPhone is for.

Tweetdeck ★ ★ ★ 

Tweetie      ★ ★ ★ ★ ★