For iPad users that are on twitter, your options are fairly limited. TweetDeck looks great, but it’s buggy and excessively slow to load. Twitteriffic is alright buy I’m not a big fan of the interface. Tweetie 2 is slated to be released as the “official” twitter app–it should be out today.
There was some noise earlier about a new iPad twitter app that has hit the scene. It’s called ShinyTweet and I’ve had a chance to test it out for a while. Let’s see how it fares to the power twitter apps like SimplyTweet on the iPhone.
Here are the main features of ShinyTweet:
-Columned interface with reorganizable columns
-Multiple Twitter accounts
-Twitter Timeline’s you’d expect: Home, Mentions, User, Messages, Retweets and many more
-Twitter search
-Trending topics
-Direct Messaging
-Favorites
-Cached tweets
-Support for all interface orientations
-Support for old-school retweeting, and Twitter’s new retweet feature
-URL shortening (bit.ly)
Upon launching ShinyTweet setting up my accounts was easy. You can add columns of your liking such as @replies, Direct Messages, and your timeline. When you tap on a tweet, it pops out to the right. From here, you have the regular options to retweet, reply, favourite, etc.
When you view links within tweets, a browser opens right up within the app which makes surfing really easy thanks to the iPad’s large screen. Overall, ShinyTweet looks nice but I found it a bit awkward to use. Maybe I’m so used to using SimplyTweet on the iPhone, but after some prolonged usage I noticed a few things that didn’t feel “right”.
For starters, having to tap the “-” to close every single tweet that pops to the right gets a bit tiresome. Also, when swiping left to right, I found it wasn’t very smooth if my finger happened to drag a column just slightly either up or down beforehand. So it got a bit frustrating moving from timelines and replies.
In terms of iPad twitter apps, there is a real lack of “amazing” ones. Whoever can get one right out of the gate will strike it rich. ShinyTweet is a great start, but it lacks power features like SimplyTweet offers. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by using SimplyTweet, but nevertheless ShinyTweet will get better with updates and further development.
ShinyTweet is $3.99 in the App Store.
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