First Look: Tabloids. A Clean Way to Read Twitter On Your iPad.

If you happen to use @Twitter, you’ll know that there are a number of third party clients available for the service which allow you to read your @replies, @mentions and more on the move. While Tabloids isn’t a Twitter client per-se, it does allow you to read the tweets of your own accounts in a more original layout.

Set to a backdrop of an oak table, @TabloidsApp allows users to turn tweets from the people they follow, on multiple accounts they own, into a clean, tabloid-style spread, allowing you to see and read the latest news from your account over the past hour just as you would a newspaper. To start you simply login. Logging into Tabloid is managed securely by oAuth with the app redirecting you to Twitter.com to enter your credentials.

Once logged in, the app will take a few minutes to gather your headlines from the past hour and then display them in a tabloid fashion. Tweets are set out just as your usual tabloid newspaper is, with a featured article on the top left, five other less important stories on the right, and below these four more highlighted stories.

Towards the bottom of the app you’ll see a list of the top 5 trending topics for that hour. Tapping on any tweets or relevant trending topic will load the app’s in-app browser, and either load Twitter search if a trending topic, showing you a full list of tweets for that search, or take you to the link relating to that specific tweet. Again, this isn’t your usual ‘Twitter client’. Instead, think of it more as a shell which needs a lot of work.

The app has a few glaring issues. Firstly, Twitter authentication. The first time I tried to connect my account (@razorianfly) to the app I got an immediate Twitter.com error page with a lot of weird coding. The developers though say they are aware of the issue, and to re-authenticate a second time. Sure enough, the second time authentication was successful, going through a lot quicker. Now, I currently follow 6,358 people and Tabloids took just under 2 minutes to gather my 10 headlines – which granted isn’t shocking .. but could do with being a little faster in my opinion.

My last caveat though is on a personal level. Maybe I’ve just become too accustomed to having rounded clients with a lot of Twitter-based functionality, but for me Tabloids isn’t quite there yet. While it obviously isn’t meant to be a Twitter client, and it does what it says on the tin, there’s clearly a lot of extra functionality which could be incorporated into this app, which simply isn’t there yet. The first of which being multiple pages. Currently, Tabloids will only display up to 10 headlines and 5 trending topics. For $2.99, to some people, this may seem a bit low.

That said, if you fancy a change to the rigid ‘client’ experience, and simply want to read the most important headlines from the people that you follow in a quick fashion, Tabloids is a clean alternative. But be warned, it won’t offer much over what your Twitter client’s can already do, and for its functionality seems a little overpriced.

As one App Store reviewer puts it “Tabloids is pretty bare bones at this point”.