iPhone Twitter App reviewed: TweetDeck

Twetdeck has quite a strong position among the desktop clients for Twitter, but up until recently (meaning yesterday) they didn’t make any move on the iPhone market. Introducing TweetDeck for the iPhone, a free Twitter client that made quite an impression on me.

I’ll start with saying that I’m quite a fan of Twitterfon and have sporadically used Tweetie, and back at my iPhone first experiences I was quite satisfied with Twiterrific. As you can see, I followed a “from complex to simple” path and I still feel that’s the normal path a Twitter client should go.

Well, TweetDeck is not the simplest Twitter client out there, but surprisingly enough is making up on this at the usability chapter. TweetDeck is not only a very intuitive app but also has some very cool, unique features. Let’s take them one at a time.

Twitter Column Browsing

Remember how you browse through your Safari opened windows on your iPhone? Well, TweetDeck does exactly the same, only instead of web pages, you’ll be browsing through so called “columns” which are in fact different versions of the Twitter timeline.

You get by default your timeline, your mentions and your direct messages. You can add more columns, but more on that in a moment. You can navigate from one window to another by hitting the big “+” sign on the toolbar, or you can swipe left to right. For your convenience there are also some buttons to be tapped on the lower right and left corner of the interface, just above the toolbar. Here’s how my “Mentions” column is looking like:

Interesting thing about that toolbar is the effect of the “+” button, which stays a little bit bigger, I think the exact name for this effect is fish-eye.

Twitter Groups

In TweetDeck you can add more columns to the initial ones, just like in the desktop app. And identically to that you can create groups of tweeterers or you can create a specific search. Here’s how the set up screen for groups is looking like:

As you can see it’s pretty simple to add a new group.

Enhanced Tweet Screen

TweetDeck features an enhanced tweet screen, with less intrusive links for actions (retweet, dm or reply) but with more space for the content. One thing that I liked is the ability to email a tweet if you find it interesting. I’m gonna use this coz I think is much more reliable than bookmarking or faving.

Other than that, TweetDeck is multi-user (though you can’t combine two users on the same timeline) and, as its brother on the desktop, always shows the number of API calls so you know anytime how much you have left.

Although the interface is one of the best usability examples on the iPhone, I do think there can be improvements. Especially the messages you get when you synchronize the main screen are a little bit strange, I don’t really want to know instantly how many new messages I have in each column. If I set up 6-7 columns then those messages will take out all the space in the main screen.

At the first look TweetDeck behave pretty good, I had no crash whatsoever, which is impressive if you take into account the complexity of the app (and the associated memory management hassle).

TweetDeck is a free app in the AppStore.