Tweetie Becomes Twitter on the iPhone
As you may already know, Twitter bought the company behind the popular Tweetie and Tweetie2 clients. They wanted to have a single official Twitter client to be built on the existing features of Tweetie2. The fruits of their labor were finally realized this week, when Tweetie2 was removed from the App Store and replaced with Twitter 3.0.
The best thing about the new app is that it is now completely free, unlike the apps of the past. There are a few new bells and whistles in the new app, but overall, I haven’t found it to be all that different than Tweetie2. The app icon is prettier, but that isn’t much to write home about. Retweeting and other actions have been simplified in the new version, but I’ve found most of the changes to be quite subtle.
My only complaint is that users are still stuck with black text on a white background. The original Tweetie had an option to change the background color to black. Personally, I liked reading in that way. That option disappeared in Tweetie2, and at the time I went as far as to write the company and tell them I missed the feature. I received a reply from the company! They had said that a large number of users had written asking for that very feature to make a return. They said that it would be brought back in version 2.2, citing that they had too many important changes to make in 2.1. Now that Tweetie was bought by Twitter, that plan must have been scrapped. There is no option in version 3.0 to change the background color. Umph!
Despite that relatively minor complaint, it is still my belief that Tweetie/Twitter 3.0 is still the best Twitter client for the iPhone. I can only hope that they finally update the aging Mac desktop Twitter client, which is still stuck on version 1.2.6. Hurry up, guys!
Since I wrote this post, Tweetie for Mac has been updated slightly to v1.2.8. I wrote Twitter (via Twitter) and asked them if they were going to continue developing it. I have not received a reply.