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It took a while, but the official Twitter app for Apple's iPad is finally available. (Get cracking on your app, Facebook!)
2010-09-02
And in brief testing this morning, it's really slick, and has already become our Twitter app of choice on the iPad.
The user interface design, like Twitter on the iPhone, is simple and attractive.
But there is one new feature that could be jarring and annoying at first: If you click on a tweet with a link in it, a new window slides into view, and automatically loads the link. This could seem chaotic, especially if links are triggered automatically. And it could pose problems at work if your friends are linking to porn. But we're already getting used to it.
Take a tour, and see what we're talking about.
When you first launch the app, you can see Twitter topics, and a place to sign in to your account or sign up for a new account.
If you tap on one of the topics on the left, it loads a bunch of tweets from related users. This is a solid experience for people who don't have Twitter accounts, and a way for them to get value out of the app.
Type in your username and password...
Here's your stream of tweets.
If you tap on a tweet, a new window slides in from the right, showing the tweet and the person's profile. This sliding action could be jarring at first.
And if the tweet you tap on has a link in it, a window slides in and the website that's linked to automatically loads. Again, this could be jarring, and could pose problems at work if your wacky friends link to porn. But we're getting used to it.
If you want to close the browser window, swipe it to the right to get rid of it.
Here's what @replies, or "Mentions," look like.
There's an interesting UI for direct messages, too. If you tap on one, it opens up a "conversation" type view.
Here, Twitter DMs look almost like Apple's text messaging user interface. You can swipe the window to the right to close it, as with other slide-in windows.
Here's what your "profile" page looks like.
There's also a "search" panel.
Here's what it looks like when you compose a new tweet. Graph paper!
You can add a photo from your photo library.
Or add your location, which will prompt this warning.
Or shrink URLs. Right now, it's using j.mp, which is owned by bit.ly, but we assume Twitter will switch to its own URL shortener at some point.
Stocktwits appears to be integrated, or at least stock ticker search: If you tap on a stock ticker like $AAPL, it will load all the tweets that match $AAPL.
As with Twitter for the iPhone, you can pull the menus down to refresh them.
Here's the settings panel.
yFrog is the default image and video provider, but you can pick from a bunch. Instapaper is the default "Read Later" provider.
A few more settings.
Here's what it looks like in landscape mode.
And here's how a web page loads in from the side in landscape mode.
