Saurik: Twitterific App For iPad Massive Dissappointment
Saurik recently gave twitterific a shot on his ipad and lets just say his opinion on the app wasn’t very pretty. Below is what he had to say about twitter and all of the 3rd party twitter apps that are popping up on a daily basis:
I am a die hard fan of iPhone Twitterific. In fact, I’d say that it is the most important third party application I have on my device, and in fact possibly the only one I use. Twitterific has super-fast scrolling and seemed to really get the Twitter workflow. The iPad version of this app doesn’t live up to that legacy.
Really, the iPad version seems like a complete rewrite. Almost all of the features for how to display the content are gone. Maybe I’m just being dense, but I’ve searched around the UI and the Settings app, and can’t find any switches or levers.
So, by default (and therefore by requirement) it doesn’t show the actual usernames of the people with their posts, which is the only way the website shows names, making switching between them impossible (as I am simply not going to relearn the names of the hundreds of people I interact with on Twitter
).
Meanwhile, much of the flexibility in how tweets are sent was removed. Ever since Twitter released the “don’t show @replies unless you follow both users” upgrade, it has been critical to be able to mark certain replies as “not really a reply” (as you are replying to a single user, but on a general issue for everyone to see), which was easily accomplished with the interface of the iPhone application.
The performance is also horrible. Despite this faster device (and a design that failed to use the extra screen real-estate for anything but larger fonts), scrolling lists of tweets in the iPad version of Twitterific lags and skips. I don’t know if they lost the developers that worked on the original version, but this should not have been reimplemented.
Finally, the original version of Twitterrific had support for complex searches and filters, letting you select based on location and screen name, as well as supporting both “all” and “any” keyword searches. None of these features are present in the iPad version the application.
I /highly/ recommend that users try installing the iPhone version of this application, to experience how it operated. Even with pixel doubling, it is much more functional. This, unfortunately, means that the new iPad keyboard isn’t usable, but frankly the old keyboard on the new screen is not bad enough to warrant all of the other functionality loss.
(Typed on my not-yet-jailbroken iPad.)
Tags: filte, iPad, Saurik, scrolling lists, twitter
May 20th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Hey there,
Some important counter points to this post. You can indeed display screen names instead of real names in Twitterrific for iPad. Head to the iPad’s Settings App and tap on Twitterrific under the list of applications and select “Show real names – OFF”.
Not really sure how “critical” the reply problem is, since none of our iPad users have asked for a different method to process replies. Not sure how to respond to this one.
As for performance, Twitterrific performs smooth as butter on all the iPads our testers tried it out on. In fact, we’ve never had any complaints about scrolling performance or stuttering. If you’re seeing such behavior, it might be because you’re running a jailbroken device with system level extensions that are eating up memory. Just a possibility.
Thanks for your time.
May 20th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Makes sense, your right as long as your keeping your customers happy then do your thing. I could care less about the situation with twitter apps im using the official twitter app and have been (tweetie) for about a year now. I’m happy with simplicity is all.
May 20th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Saurik is a power user and can’t see how the simplicity is better for 90% of users. The missing “features” are not really useful at all 95% of the time, even for power users. Twitterrific was never for power users.