Since the first Twitter clients on the iPhone came out, I have tried many of them. Eventually I picked TwitterFon and when the Pro version was released I immediately upgraded to it. I find the feature set rich, it is very easy to use and has overall good stability and performance.
But as a long time user of TweetDeck’s desktop client, when I read that an iPhone version was just released, I thought to give it a try.
Well, I must say that TweetDeck for iPhone still has a long way to go before it becomes my preferred twitter client on the iPhone. Here are a few reasons why based on a 5 minutes usages:
- The app is not stable at all. In 5 minutes it crashed 5 times on me. In one of the cases, after a crash I had to try 3 times before the apps actually worked
- Strange error message indicating that I am not connected to the internet appeared while I was on Wifi kept appearing (see gallery below)
- The app does not seem to have a local cache of draft messages. If the app crash while you type a tweet, after restart you will have to start all over again!
- If you type in a tweet and then attach to it a photo, your tweet message will disappear and gets replaced by the link to the photo. Ugh!
- Search is not easily accessible. A few steps are required before you can do that which makes search a feature for power users only. First you need to add a new column called “Twitter Search” and set its initial search tern. Then whenever you want to actually edit the search term you have to: (a) navigate to the search column (b) click on the column settings wheel (c) change the search term. However, on TwitterFon search is a main function that is always visible at the bottom bar which makes it very easy to modify a search term
- Too many times and extra click is required:
- TweetDeck opens by default in the column preview mode and it forces you to hit another time a column in order to make it use all screen area. IMHO, this should not be the default logic as for most user the Friends column is what they want to read most of the times when the app loads. Better usage of the 80%-20% rule would help here
- When viewing a streem of tweets, you can not just click on a link that was tweeted to open it. You first need to open a specific tweet in a large preview mode and only then the link becomes live
- Last personal preference is the UI color. I prefer a light and bright app
On the positive site, TweetDeck has some features that I wish could be added to TwitterFon like:
- Growl integration – those little notification icons that float at the upper left corner whenever there is a new update
- QuickFollow button which lets you quickly type in a user name and follow
It is interesting to see how the battle to be the most popular twitter client is accelerating. But for now, I stick with TwitterFon Pro as my preferred Twitter client for the iPhone.
For a detailed comparison check out this great post.
