Remember Tweetie? It was the fantastic Twitter app for iPhone right before Twitter bought it and made it the official app. I kept eying it because of it's beautiful design and continued to wonder whether or not it was the worth the $2.99 price tag. I eventually took the dive and it still to this day was the very best app on my iPhone. When Tweetie 2 came out, I was quick to make the additional $3 investment for the new app.

And now we have Tweetbot. Everyone thought that the official Twitter app killed third-party apps, but the good people at Tapbots didn't agree. They created Tweetbot, a very popular Twitter app for iPhone that has been getting a lot of attention lately. Many are calling it the best Twitter client they've ever used and are praising the makers for paying attention to every little detail. It's $1.99 in the app store. With all the praise, I took the dive.

Design & User Interface
Tweetbot is simply a beautiful app. When all the other reviewers kept talking up the attention to detail, they weren't lying. Every single pixel except for the keyboard is custom made. Everything. Plus, the little animations and great customization options here and there are just the icing on the cake.

What makes Tweetbot unique is its lack of tapping and use of gestures to get things done. Tap a tweet once to bring up a panel underneath with common tools like reply, retweet, favorite, etc. Tap twice to get more details on the tweet, like the user, hashtags, or links. Tap three times to reply. The triple tap can be customized to reply, retweet, favorite, or translate. Tap and hold a tweet for any other options. Swipe left to view related tweets and replies. Swipe right to see a conversation thread. Swipe down to refresh. Simple and effective.

There are some complaints worth noting. There's a noticeable lag when scrolling through tweets. It's not a huge deal, but still something that gets a little annoying. I also don't particularly like the use of a gear icon almost everywhere you look. Gears are usually used for editing settings/preferences. This is used to do anything, and could potentially be confusing. For instance, in a new tweet window, this gear icon brings up a menu to add your location, post a photo or video, etc. In the small menu under a tweet after tapping it, this same icon brings up tools to act upon a tweet. It's also used to sort out retweets.

Features
Features is certainly where Tweetbot shines. In addition to all the touch gestures you can use, there's tons of customization options. The last two icons (set by default as favorites and search) can be swapped out for other features like retweets and lists. In the settings, you can add all of your photo, video, link shortening, and read it later services. Of course, you can add multiple accounts and you can customize these services for each.

One feature in particular that I find to be useful is the easy way to view the timeline for a particular list. Just tap "Timeline" at the top and you can choose to filter it by list.

There is one glaring omission in this app and that's the complete lack of landscape support. You can't view any aspect of the app in landscape mode nor can you tweet in landscape mode. This feature needs to be added immediately and certainly cripples the current experience. Some are also likely to complain about its lack of support for services like TwitLonger, though I never use anything like that. There's also no push notifications.

Value
Overall, Tweetbot is a great Twitter client and one of the best available for iPhone and iPod touch. Is it worth the $2? Many are going to disagree, but I say no. For the terrific price of absolutely nothing, you can have the official Twitter for iPhone app which can deliver a more polished experience and similar features. You just don't get all those "little things" mentioned above.

The people at Tapbots have put together a fine app, but it's only a 1.0 release and it shows. I'm sticking with the Twitter for iPhone app as of now, but should the developers release updates to improve the experience and add landscape mode--and they eventually will--I'll be more than happy to try Tweetbot out once more.

Author's Note: I first published this article to Technorati. Read it here.