Osfoora HD, for Twitter

The relationship between Twitter users and their apps has always been strange. What one user finds absolutely brilliant and perfect is horribly incompetent design to another. Osfoora HD is a new app for the iPad to try to hook iPad Twitter users, and it comes packed with powerful features, but it is only for users looking for a particular type of Twitter experience.

Osfoora HD lets you do everything that you'd expect from a modern Twitter app. You can view your timeline, replies, direct messages, lists, and search. When tweeting, you can add pictures, videos, geotag your tweets, shorten links, and even tweet songs from your library. These are all features that top-flight Twitter apps have had, and Osfoora HD's inclusion of them even in its initial release is impressive considering other apps have had trouble re-incorporating features from their iPhone equivalents.

Osfoora HD not only comes packed with powerful tweeting features, but the interface handles beautifully, incorporating standard UI functions and doing them all in an incredible smooth and easy to use manner. As well, everything looks fantastic on the iPad screen, from user icons to just the crisp display of text.

The problem with Osfoora HD is that it really only takes advantage of the iPad in that it displays everything in a large font. Otherwise, this is basically just an iPhone Twitter client blown up to iPad resolution, even coming down to a similar number of tweets as iPhone apps display. It feels like a waste of screen space to present such a limited amount of information. It all looks nice, but the iPad is such an expansive device, with so much resolution and screen space, that to limit users to only display a small portion of one timeline seems almost criminal. This may be great for casual users, but advanced users may be feeling a bit claustrophobic only seeing a few tweets in their timeline at a time.

Osfoora HD is just a contradiction. It comes packed with a laundry list of advanced features that power users would expect from an advanced Twitter app, but then it shows itself to be more of a casual user-focused app to check up on a few people, or for advanced users who only like to check the most recent happenings in their stream. For users who like the kind of information overload that other apps can give them, Osfoora HD may be worth a pass. However, Osfoora HD's got everything it needs to be a really great app with all its tweeting features, it's just a question of what your needs are from viewing tweets, and if only viewing short batches a time is your preference, then Osfoora HD is a great choice of app, and is technically sound to boot.