Let’s be honest, there are now more Twitter clients in the AppStore than you can shake a proverbial stick at. Most if the new ones hardly seem worth of our attention. But one that was released last week certainly managed to create a lot of buzz, so we felt it only right to have a look at it.<\/p>\n
Osfoora, meaning little bird was created by Said Marouf and at first glance certainly seems worthy of the attention it has received. Many people have stated that it looks a heck of a lot like Tweetie 2, which is probably one of, if not the Twitter client of choice. Whilst I can see what they mean I would say that, to be fair, it looks like quite a few of the Twitter apps available at the moment. But this isn’t that surprising, most of them use the same layout design with only minor graphical differences to separate them (with twitterific being the only obvious exception in my mind).<\/p>\n
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\nWith that said, it seems it’s the small things that deem how well an App like this is received, with people more interested in speed, smoothness and ease of use. So how does Osfoora stack up?<\/p>\n
Upon first loading App and inputting your Twitter details you are taken to a home screen with a distinctve 3×4 grid layout. From here you can select to do a number of things, including changing your settings, viewing your profile, lists or nearby tweets. Now I’ve heard a few people claim that they struggled to find their timeline, not quite sure why that was as I found it straight away. Just select accounts (yes, Osfoora supports multiple Twitter accounts) and then on the account you want to view, easy. An update is due that changes the main screen to make this more obvious for people who still don’t know.<\/p>\n
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Sending new tweets is a breeze and a small toolbar just above the keyboard gives you shortcuts to adding images, taking a photo, searching a username or recently used hastags and you can also geotag your tweets if you so wanted. There’s maybe a few features missing here, it would be great if, when replying to someone you could view there tweet whilst you typed, and i’d also like to see the ability to tweet what song i’m currently listening too.<\/p>\n
Once viewing your \u00c2\u00a0timeline you’ll note that this is all pretty standard and what your’d expect from a Twitter client at this price level, it loads fast (at least on my iPhone 3G) and scrolling though your timeline is smooth and responsive. Perhaps the strangest thing here is the “pull down menu” at the top of your feed. This gives you access to three options; refresh, profile view and an option to skip straight to the bottom of your feed. For those used to Tweetie 2 or other clients that use “pull down to refresh” this may cause some confusion, but not enough to put me off this app.<\/p>\n
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Whilst viewing your timeline you can simply tap on a tweet to view more details on it or tap and hold to bring up a context menu allowing you to retweet, reply, favourite etc. Not quite as intuiative as other apps but works well enough. With landscape mode for every part of the client, including that 3×4 menu this really is ticking all the right boxes for me.<\/p>\n
But that’s not to say that it’s perfect, Whilst it has most of the major features your’d expect, Lists, Trends, Nearby tweets, ability to view conversations, draft manager and more, there are a couple of options that aren’t here. The image uploader is limited to yFrog or Twitpic (img.ly anyone?) and the URL shortener is equally limited. It would be great if we could use custom API’s for both of these. I suppose though that all of these are little things, and it would be unfair to write-off an app for that alone.<\/p>\n
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Overall, I really like this client, it’s not quite a game changer (or should I say Tweetie killer) yet, but there is\u00c2\u00a0definitely\u00c2\u00a0a lot here to love. I’m really looking forward to future updates that could potentially change this from a good twitter client into a great one. I really like the idea of the home menu and would like to see them try something equally new with the standard timeline view, I’m getting bored with seeing the same design over and over again (although that might be something that is limited by Apple). If you’re still not sure if Osfoora is for you, there’s a lite Ad-Supported version for anyone who wants to take a look before they buy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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