When Twitter acquired Loren Brichter’s acclaimed Tweetie app and made it the official Twitter app on iPhone, it came with the promise that Twitter for iPad was in the works as well. Twitter has just updated Twitter for iPhone to version 3.1, bringing iPad support to the now universal app.
The first thing you notice about Twitter for iPad is that it feels very smooth and intuitive, much like how Loren Brichter’s other apps have felt. The app is far more complex than Twitter for iPhone, though. Swiping across a tweet no longer calls up the reply and favorite options, for example – it’s now used for moving tabs in and out of view, so you can hide or return to a specific user or tweet view that you called up. You can add multiple accounts, and can upload pictures and video, view your lists, and all the other features that have become standard to most Twitter apps, including Twitter for iPhone.
Links are opened in an ingenious way – when you click on a tweet with a link, it opens up a smaller web view of the link, so that you can view it without it taking up the whole screen, but you can expand it to the whole screen if you wish. If you want a quick view of a conversation between people, you can use 2 fingers to drag down from the tweet to open up a view of the last few tweets. Sadly, image hosting services do not open up in-line previews of the images in your stream, you have to click on the links to view the images. Profiles now show a list of 5 users who are considered ‘similar’ to that user for you to also follow. Also, links to tweets do not open as a native view in the app, they open up the tweet in the mobile Twitter site.
Twitlonger support is implemented for standard tweets, but not for DMs. The miniature DM reply view also doesn’t show character count, and only lets you edit the DM by calling up the draft, by hitting the new tweet button. It’s very unintuitive, and something that needs to be fixed. There’s a lot of little tweaks that the app needs, as this is clearly a 1.0 release focused on the bigger picture than on minutiae, and there is a lot of complexity to this app that makes little things easy to miss. But, given the state of Twitter apps on the iPad, a Loren Brichter-developed app with a lot of intriguing and new interface features for free (can you say multiple account support?) is welcome. The app is sure to receive future updates as well, making it worth keeping an eye on for iPad-owning Twitter users.
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