TweetyPop

Seems that the space theme has caught my eye recently because after I mentioned Planetary on our blog, I picked up a space-themed Twitter app. After Twitter bought Tweetie, many assumed third-party Twitter apps would die off. And after the recent purchase of TweetDeck by Twitter, it seems that the best Twitter apps are now owned by Twitter. But third-party

apps can still be successful if they try new and visually interesting things with Twitter. TweetyPop has done just that.

TweetyPop presents tweets at varying distances on a picture of space. The tweets are arranged at varying distances based on the time that they were tweeted. Tweets in the distance are sort of greyed-out to signify that they are farther away as well. Possibly the coolest part about the tweets is that they are moveable and “throwable.” When the reader is finished with a tweet, they can simply flick it off of the screen and it disappears. When all of the tweets currently at the front have been flicked to the side, the next set move themselves to the front. As an alternative to flicking the tweets away, there are buttons at the bottom-right and left that move throw sets of tweets. If such an interactive experience isn’t what the user wants, they can also use a slideshow mode (with varying speeds) that moves the sets of

tweets automatically. A list mode also exists, but there’s no reason to use it over the official Twitter app.

I only had one major problem with this app: the inability to use portrait mode. I use portrait mode for most apps that include reading (except for Zite, I prefer that in landscape), but there’s no option in TweetyPop. It won’t stop me from using the app in the future, but I’d like to see the developers add portrait mode in a future release. Otherwise, TweetyPop is an awesome alternative experience for reading tweets. I’m likely to switch between the official app and TweetyPop depending on my mood.