Tweetie 2 – Review

Tweetie 2, the follow up to the hugely successful Tweetie, was earlier this evening approved by the App Store and was available to download shortly afterwards. Now, don’t be fooled into thinking that the upgrade is free if you already have the original Tweetie, you will still have to fork over £1.90. So I’ll be reviewing the application and asking myself: is it worth it? If you just want to look at the pictures, just click on one to load it up, then click the arrows to navigate between them.

After you enter your account details, you’ll be greeted with a message saying that your account was verified, and you’ll be sent to the landing page which contains all of the Tweets from you and your friends feed. You’ll know which Tweets are yours because your picture will justified on the right hand side. I don’t like this because it ruins the flow, they could easily just have a different colour background like they did originally.

The replies section hasn’t changed that much. You can search through the replies if you want to find a particular one if you have a lot of them, as you can see in the third picture.

Your Tweet stream is as you would expect, again, no drastic differences from the original Tweetie. Again, you can search through your own Tweets if you want to do that.

In additional to the default landing page, the way you can reload Tweets is different. As opposed to shaking, you can slide up and release as you can see from the first picture. I didn’t find anything wrong with the shaking method, but I do like the sliding method because it fits in with the “slide to lock” feature.

You can also view your friends and search through them if you’re looking for someone in particular. The way a profile is laid out is different from the original Tweetie. Different things are in different places and have a different look to them. For example, the biographical information is now inside the white rounded oblong. Other stats such as amount of Tweets are displayed underneath.

The messages also have a different layout, they aren’t dissimilar to how the Facebook 3.0 application and various messenger applications arrange messages. By having the pictures of the different people involved on different sides of the screen, it makes it easier to only read the other persons responses.

Writing a Tweet is basically the same as it always was, however there is now a character count in the bottom corner which acts as a drop down menu with options to insert your location, pictures and videos. You can also type in landscape by rotating the device. This makes it easier to type.

You’ll find the trending topics under the magnifying  glass icon, if you click on one of the topics you’ll be sent to a list of the latest Tweets; again, nothing new there. However, you can now save that search if you want to go back to it at another time, for example if the topic is no longer trending.

You can search through the public Tweets if you want to find out about something in particular, for example, what people think of a TV show that you just watched. Tweetie saves your previous searches if you want to go back to them at a later date.

We’re nearing the end of the review now, there’s not much to go over; but here’s some cool bits that I noticed while testing out the application. Tweetie now automatically shortens long links like the web version does, and under the settings, you’re able to choose which service you want to use, I like bit.ly personally.

Other settings that you tweak are where pictures and videos are uploaded to that you include in your Tweets, I’m boring so I stick with TwitPic and TwitVid respectively. Last but not least, the new version of Tweetie now has a new icon, so everyone will know that you spent £1.90 to buy it.

So, lets end with my question: is it worth it? Well, obviously there are some major improvements, modifications, tweaks and added features; all of which make Tweetie a useful yet lovable, (and one of the best), application, which is in my opinion one of the best out there on the App Store. However, if you’re happy with the original Tweetie and don’t find any of the above changes useful, or simply do not want to buy another version of an application that you have already bought, then that’s okay as well.

Download Tweetie 2 | Steven – Administrator.

Facebook 3.01 for the iPhone OS

Only a couple of days after the much awaited Facebook 3.01 update was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a follow up update was released earlier this week. The updates listed for 3.01 are numerous but are mainly bug and interface fixes based on user feedback after 3.01 was released.

In my opinion, I find this version a lot more usable than the previous version as it emulates the desktop and web versions better. You can do a lot more such as write comments on profiles, like people’s statuses and look at recent notifications. To show you the new update, I have taken screenshots of some of the improved parts of the application. Please click on a thumbnail below in order to see the full image as well as a description of what the feature and update actually is.

If you want to download the update, you can do so by visiting the App Store on your iPhone or iPod Touch where it will be listed under updates. You can write what you think about it in the comments below this post.

Steven – Administrator.

Wordpress for iPhone

Just downloaded the Wordpress for the iPhone from the App store. If all goes well, it should upload the picture of the App on my iPod Touch to the right. Here’s a mini-review kind of, I like the App, it isn’t perfect but I can’t complain because it was free. My main gripe is that it doesn’t seem to have much of a UI, in my mind, combing Wordpress with the iPhone should have been a beautiful mix. Maybe I was expecting too much for a blogging appplication.

It’s useful if you want to make a quick post, it isn’t ideal for doing anything for more than a paragraph. Using that touch keyboard can be overkill, maybe when 3.0 comes out on the June 17th, the bluetooth support will allow for proper keyboard input.

A useful application for last minute or on the go blogging, specially because of it’s offline support.

Steven – Adminstrator.

How to code a praticle Wordpress theme by Steven Knight.

I’m currently writing a tutorial on how to code my Wordpress theme, here’s my opening paragraph:

Cue generic introduction: ever wanted to code a Wordpress theme but didn’t know how? In this tutorial, I will be going in depth on how to code a pre-designed layout by me. I will explain the use of HTML, PHP and Wordpress conditional tags, here’s a list of what you should learn:

• Simple use of generic PHP.
• Core use of Wordpress conditional PHP.
• Using complex but simple markup in HTML to aid the design.
• A small introduction to reset style sheets.
• Efficient CSS code to aid the main design.
• How Wordpress works i.e. index, single pages, pages, etc.

Okay, are you ready?

If that interests you, head over to the topic that I will be adding parts to over the next couple of days. The reason why I’m not doing the tutorial on this site, is because I want to reach a larger audience.

Link to topic at joejoe.org.

Steven – Administrator.

Mac OS X Leopard – 10.5.6

Long time no post… nothing major to post about. I just got the urge to install Hackingtosh, so I downloaded the latest hacked version of Mac OS X Leopard which is 10.5.6, everything is running smoothy… and it looks great too as you can see from the screenshot below.

Screenshot

Steven – Administrator. Updated 31/01/10.