Tweeterena 2

It seems that there isn’t all that much love for the official Twitter app. Even here at RazorianFly our first impressions left us feeling a little, shall we say, disappointed. And it is due to this that I once again find myself buying an obscene amount of different Twitter apps to try.

This brings me to Tweeterena 2, released just a few days ago for iPhone. This has followed in the same footsteps as Tweetie did with Tweetie 2 (and indeed Simply Tweet did with Simply Tweet 3), instead of an update to the existing app, it’s released as “all new” and you buy it again. The developer states that this app doesn’t use a single line of code from the original version and is in fact written from the ground up, like new.

So, as we know, Tweeterena 2 is a brand new app built from the ground up. But, how does it stack up against all the other Twitter apps? Well, let’s start with the good stuff, Tweeterena packs a lot of what you would expect from a fully featured Twitter client, including support for 5 different image upload sites, including twitpic and imgly. It also contains support for a number of URL shortening services, and more importantly, the ability to add a custom URL shortener. That’s right, you can get http://rfly.me working within Tweeterena 2.

Also included here is an in-built FollowFriday creator, simply scroll through the names of those you want to include in your shoutout and hit “send”, job done. A rather odd addition is the ability to access the iPod.app direct from the app in order to select music to listen to. Not sure about this one, it doesn’t tweet what you are listening to so what’s wrong with setting your music playing before opening the app. How much time do they think we’ll spend checking Twitter on the go?

Design seems to be where it’s all at when it comes to people’s choice of client. This is where things start to go a little awry. Tweeterena 2 makes use of the grid menu that seems to be becoming more common these days. Tweeterena 2 looks quite nice here, with clean bold squares for all of your different options. Oddly, once in the menu, you have to tap the title to return to your main timeline (why not a menu button like you have for every other option?) Whilst I like the clean look of the menu, it’s split over a 5×3 grid and it feels like it’s the menu as it would be on the iPad version, nice, just not optimised for the iPhone’s smaller screen.

I suppose the menu is a personal choice, but I think everyone wants the same thing when viewing their timeline. Regrettably, as it is, Tweeterena starts to fall down again. Whilst the white text on a gray background is clear and easy to read, the usernames are in black (which is harder to read). In addition, the division between tweets isn’t clear,and whilst @replies show in a darker grey, your own tweets are identical to everyone else’s making them hard to spot.

Performing actions on tweets is also a little awkward. Tapping a tweet brings up a block menu at the bottom of the screen and it just doesn’t seem intuitive to me, and it doesn’t handle images within the app, instead opening up the image hosts website. It does the same for twitlonger, and with no ability to resize these websites, it’s just no use. If you want to view images and have people who use twitlonger on a regular basis, you need to look elsewhere.

Perhaps the biggest failing however, is the app’s inability to remember where you are in your timestream. Everytime you refresh it shoots to the top of your timeline, forcing you to scroll back to where you were. This makes the app almost unusuable, especially for the first viewing of the day where you have probably missed more tweets than any app can handle. I’ve searched through the settings to see if this is something that can be changed their, but no luck.

I don’t want you to think that I’m just writing this review to complain about the app, i’m really not. I think it has potential, it feels unique and stands out a little from the rest of the clients out there. It has a few nice features (including the ability to get the app to inform you of tweeting milestones) and overall I like the crisp, bold design. If updates are forthcoming that address the issues i’ve mentioned above I will definitely let you know, but for now? It just needs more work i’m afraid.