The Official Twitter iPad App: It’s a lot of Twitter on your Face [IPad Apps]

Eventually, the official Twitter app for the iPad is here. Is it the suitable iPad Twitter app? Is dependent upon who you’re.

If you’re a significant Twitter user, you’ll probably adore it. It’s designed to be a whole tweet-and-browse-and-tweet-some-more package, so which you can consume what individuals are tweeting and everything they’re linking to, within a single app. The tradeoff for the added complexity is that more casual Twitter users might prefer simpler-feeling apps like Twitterific.

The interface starts out straightforward, like an easy cross between the Tweetie for Mac and the iPhone app. But Twitter for iPad is basically a piece more complicated than it lets on-it’s essentially the most complex of the three. As opposed to sticking with the iPad’s standard split-pane views, like in Mail, Twitter is quite like its own desktop environment, with overlapping, stacked panes that move from left to right. So, on the far left, you’ve got the key control panel, like Tweetie for Mac, that is the bottom pane. To the correct of that, and on top of it, you’ve got the tweet list-either the most important feed, mentions or direct messages. While you touch on a tweet, a third pane opens to the best, on top of the alternative two. If there’s a link inside the tweet, it’ll open the browser. If not, it’ll open that person’s somebody’s profile. (And once you type a right away message, that’s layered on top of everything else via a popover, for four total layers.) You may switch back to the major tweet list or control pane by touching it, and it’ll load browser pages inside the background once you flick through other tweets. It may get cluttered quickly once you’re opening sub-menus and other things-whilst, it can provide various flexibility.

The opposite UI choice, which may end up in some quirks-like above, whenever you’ve got a right away message open-is that panes are designed to be an identical size in portrait and landscape mode. The belief is that the tweet list and panels don’t change when you rotate the iPad. It works, except when it doesn’t. I think lots of individuals are going to hate watching a browser window run off the screen.

With regards to the basics, most everything you’d expect from the iPhone app or Tweetie for Mac is here, like file attachments for photos, geolocation, search, lists and Instapaper support. There are a handful of multitouch gestures, though Twitter’s keeping it simple for now. Pinching on a tweet within the list will explode it outward with a spiffy threedee animation, so you’ll discover more details in regards to the person that tweeted it. And in the event you wanna see a reply chain, just swipe downward with two fingers.

So, what’s missing? Well, it’s very hard to retweet anything without using the native retweet function, that is intentional-Twitter’s actively discouraging the ” RT @yourmom blah blah blah” method. There’s no syncing of read/unread tweets across various Twitter apps, again for philosophical reasons-they don’t want it to feel like an inbox, apart from DMs. Native photo and video support’s not there, nevertheless it’s coming. Three-finger gestures might happen eventually.

I’m unsure how much I prefer it to my current standby, Twitterific. In a fashion, it does feel right, like an extension of the official iPhone and Mac apps. But simultaneously, it’s hard to escape the sensation of weirdness-it doesn’t feel like an iPad app should, the manner that Twitterific does, because it’s doing something quite different with the interface. Time will tell. But hey, it’s free and out now (though it will probably take a couple hours to point out up), so it’s worth giving a shot. [ Twitter ]

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This post is tagged: apps, iPad, its, lot, twitter