JungleJar

iTweet

So, I decided to take iTweet for a spin. At first glance, it looks relatively nice. However, the webpage displayed in the background, and the reason for it being there, constantly, is a mystery to me. Normally, I suppose, this wouldn’t be a big issue, but the way in which the web application interface overlays an iTweet logo in the background, and the way in which the web application interface sits at the extreme top of the browser window, gives me this incredible urge to scroll downwards or upwards.

Aside from this, iTweet is a relatively nice little web app. It makes doing nearly everything a snap.

The display is nice, minus my need to scroll, and there are a variety of features. Some of the features I most enjoyed are..

• The built in auto-refresh, search and hashtags.
• You can view the user bio, location, and URL inline with tweets. This is incredibly handy.
• You’re not entirely forced to use the iTweet settings to display your Twitter page / admin area. However, the application’s interface provides little in the way of doing a great job of reflecting the true style of your official Twitter profile.
• The “Send To – Reply” button right underneath the form-field for updating also I thought was a nice touch.

In the above image, you can see the viewing of a user’s bio inline, and the way in which it’s done is quite elegant.

Above is the nicely formatted presentation of a user’s bio, among other misc features that are quickly accessed. If you’ll also notice, the color palette changed quite a bit from the default view shown earlier. This is due to a feature of iTweet which I mentioned earlier that allows for a user’s custom display settings from Twitter.com to be displayed. While this is great, because the default iTweet aesthetics can seem quite boring after awhile, there again is the issue of the interface being displayed over a webpage in the background. I couldn’t find a way for this to function differently, preferably with just the interface being shown.

Above is my custom display with my options being used from Twitter.com. It doesn’t work out too bad, as far as the webpage in the background being displayed goes; However, as you might imagine, a user’s options / Twitter display can vary wildly.

And sometimes this happens — as all you developers know. An error occurred. This happened when I would select “Home”, which should have taken me to my default Twitter / iTweet display. What one would likely see upon first logging in. At first I thought that maybe this was a random occurance, and probably wouldn’t happen again. Well, it happened nearly every other time I would click “Home”. While this isn’t a huge pain, this is what it is.

Overall, iTweet is a nicely organized and aesthetically well presented web application for anyone who uses Twitter. While I would recommend it, I really hope the kinks are worked out a bit more by the next release.

Tweetree

What is Tweetree, you ask? The webpage had this to say..

Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post.

A little about the Tweetree features..

• Link titles are displayed inline with the Twitter update. While one might think this would look a bit cluttered or be somewhat intrusive, it isn’t at all. It’s very clean and well presented to the end user.
• One of the absolute coolest features of Tweetree is the ability to display thumbnails. You can read all about that at the Tweetree Blog.
• From the blog.. “We’ve added item-level permalinks. What this means is that you can link directly to a specific post. To find the permalink, you just have to click on the time next to the user’s name. It’ll also turn blue when you mouse over a post.”

Above you can view the link title attributes and their specialized display while using Tweetree. Cool idea, seemingly a tough one to incorporate into someone’s ‘update box’, yet they pull it off.

Other than this, though.. it just doesn’t seem like Tweetree is a stand-alone web application for users to enjoy with the same freedom you can find on Twitter.com. First off, there is a “blog” link, along with the rest of the links, attached to the edge of the page line. This, of course, links to the Tweetree Blog. While this wouldn’t bother me a bit upon default usage, I found no way to remove the link. Actually, I found no options page whatsoever. Besides that, there is an image in the upper right-hand corner of the logo the company that made Tweetree adorns. Again, no way to remove it, and I really think you should be able to.

To me, it seems like Tweetree is more of an opportunity for the company behind this application to bring more exposure to the company. Not to Tweetree. I’m just not convinced they are taking their own web application seriously enough.

I would recommend this to anyone who tweets quite a bit about media, but other than that, there’s no real point.

Related posts on JungleJar:

• Twitter opens OAuth to all developers
• 3 Web Applications That Submit Your Posts To Social Bookmarking Communities
• 4 Useful Twitter Web Applications
• Twitter Team Warns Of Recent Phishing Attempts
• Twitter Development – The Paper Level