Twittelator on the iPad

I have had the iPhone Twittelator Pro for some time and the reason I bought it was that I listened to a podcast with an interview of Andrew Stone who is the creator of Twittelator. He was so enthused about the app and all that it could do and with that combined with great reviews elsewhere I stumped up the cash even though there were decent free Twitter clients available. I am still pleased to have it and this brings us to the iPad version of Twittelator which also has high standards of usability.

Usability and a useful well designed interface is what takes an ordinary app to being a great app that you will be prepared to spend money on. with Twittelator for the iPad you get a good mix of columns, swipe actions and the ability to drill down into what you want to look at in the Twitter feed. You may use it with multiple accounts of course, by hitting the accounts button at the top of the timeline and filling in the details in a pop over. It seems that the interface works better in landscape mode and looks prettier too.

There are some customisations to be done when you get started such as putting in the details for your bit.ly account. YOu can use Instapaper which is the service that allows you to read stuff later. It is good to see integrations with other services as well as being able to specify refresh times and disable or enable sound notifications. If you have a Posterous account you will be able to put the details of that into Twittelator also. Excellent!

What I like about the application is that it is so easy to have your timeline there and be able to get to individual tweets, user information in a profile, send things off to Instapaper and even open up some web pages – then still be able to get back to the time line to see what else is coming in there. Twittelator is fast and you can be navigating around with a few taps here and there. There is enough in the app in terms of features to satisfy a nerd and yet it is still useable for the more basic user. When you look into a profile the information is set out in a very elegant format and you can add to lists or unfollow as you see fit.

There is a view called location that shows a google map and it looks really useful. It even pinpoints on the map where people are assuming they have given permission at their end to be location aware. Then there is the channels which are aggregators of specific topics and sub-topics such as Science, Sports or Technology, useful although not something that I have partaken of much yet.

There’s no button to send tweets. To prevent accidental tweets from unwanted taps on the screen, Andrew put a slider above the keyboard: when you have your tweet done, slide your finger on this arrow and hey presto, it goes off to your Twitter community. Saving a draft of a tweet is handy although I am more of write it and send it, in the way that I work.