Which Twitter App?

UPDATE: Tweetie is now the Official Twitter App for iPhone, simply called Twitter

The app so nice he made it Twice! Tweetie 2 is an award-winning Twitter app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, stowing away an unbelievable number of features into a simple, easy, attractive interface. Seriously!! Every pixel of this interface is precisely designed and intuitive to use.

Big New Features

The Pull to Refresh feature will surely show up in other iPhone apps, because it's just too convenient given how people flick around inside the iPhone interface. When you scroll to the top of your stream, a short drag reveals the search bar and a message that says “Pull Down to Refresh.” Pull down further until it switches to “Release to Refresh” and let go. Awesome!

Total Persistance is another thoughtful touch. No matter what you are doing when you exit Tweetie, it can remember where you are, the draft you wrote, the search you had open, or any other action in progress. This helps speed up the sometimes tedious process of app switching on the single-app iPhone OS, nudging it toward a multi-app feel.

The user and hashtag pickers are tucked behind the keyboard, which you reveal by tapping the character counter. Type a few letters and the list filters down to what you want. For the user picker, it filters using both their twitter username or their real name.

Other New Goodies

Powerful offline features mean you don't have to skip a beat, even when you don't have an internet connection. You can continue to write tweets, change settings, follow or block, and when Tweetie gets an internet connection again, it will execute all the actions you requested. In addition, you can now store multiple drafts and even send them to other draft-management apps, such as Birdhouse

Not content with the standard "big, medium, small" options, Tweetie offers the ability to select a text size between 13 and 20 points.

Landscape mode is available everywhere within the app. Tweet streams, searches, image viewing, web pages...everything! Or, if you only the keyboard to support the wide format there's an option for that too.

More Features in the Works

Loren, the lone developer behind atebits, has promised that more features will become available as the Twitter API releases new features. Two specifically mentioned so far are geo-tagging individual tweets and spam reporting, so you can block and report spam accounts.

Improvements on the Original

The user swipe has undergone both a facelift and a tune-up, with the options bubbling into place when you swipe a tweet from right to left. Not only can you reply, favorite, or view profile like the original Tweetie, now it additionally holds a host of new options, including re-tweeting, quoting, emailing, and translating. And don't worry, lefties, the swipe works both directions.

The single tweet screen is vastly improved, taking a cue from Mail with up and down arrows to let you browse tweets individually. However, you may see less of this screen due to the user swipe improvements and threaded conversations, which do away with the "in reply to" and "see reply" buttons that you had to page through before.

Better Search

Nearby Search now has a map-based option. You zoom to the level you want to see, and it loads up tweets on the map, refreshing with a RADAR-type swipe of the screen. You can also view them as a list like a normal stream.

Saved searches are now stored on Twitter's servers, so you can sync your saved searches across other apps, or the web interface.

On top of that, you can filter down any stream of tweets for specific keywords or usernames. Very handy for finding a specific tweet by a user, or other cases where you might need to drill down more than once.

Tiny Gripes

For some reason, Tweetie 2 has kept only one theme (light), instead of the 3 styles available in Tweetie 1 (iChat, light, dark).

Final Verdict

Tweetie 2 easily gets 5/5 stars for (again) redefining ease of use and slick, functional interface design on the iPhone. Tweetie packs in an incredible number of essential and even brand new features, and manages to be an incredibly easy to use app that sets a standard for iPhone apps.