Tweetie 2 has hit the twittersphere to universal praise and rejoicing. I have to admit it was one of the first app upgrades I’ve been excited to install in a while. After playing with it for a little while, I can say that it’s a great upgrade, more polished, lots of great new features that most people would love, well worth the paltry $3 price tag and I prefer Tweetie 1.
I got a few “why” questions when I posted this yesterday, so I’ll try to answer.
Basically, all of my my complaints are rooted in the way I want to use Twitter. I like having a casual real-time relationship with Twitter, I don’t want it to be an obligation. I don’t want an “inbox”, or a backlog of tweets staring me in the face.
- Notifications of replies and direct messages – that little indicator is an obligation, I don’t like it. I prefer to choose when I look for those things. I’ve heard that a double-tap is supposed to “mark all as read”, but that didn’t seem to work for me.
- I can’t get to the bottom of my friend’s stream. Again this is a feature for most people – Tweetie 2 auto-loads the next tweets in your stream as you scroll towards the bottom. I never get to the end! Tweetie 1 would give me 20 and let me choose if I want to keep going.
- Tweetie 2 remembers my scroll location. I haven’t used it long enough to be 100% sure on this, but on several occasions I’ve launched Tweetie 2 and found myself pretty far down my friends stream instead of up at the top. That backlog of tweets is exactly what I don’t want. In contrast, Tweetie 1 always started at the top of the stream.
I realize that for most people these are great new features. Without options to turn these things off1 Tweetie 1 fits me better. Thankfully, since Tweetie 2 is a different app, I have access to both and can choose to stick with Tweetie 1 if I want to.
- Tweetie for Mac allows you to choose to return to your scroll position or go to the newest tweet, for example. [back]
Popularity: 1% [?]
Andrew Thompson adds this Comment:
Scroll position isn’t that bad, you can tap the top part of the screen to move to the top of the page.
October 10th, 2009 at 8:53 am
David Collantes adds this Comment:
It seems it isn’t an app upgrade, as you can’t upgrade from the original Tweetie. It is a complete re-write, with an un-original name.
I might sound like a troll, but I am not. I am just slightly pissed. I paid for Tweetie, when I could have used it for free (jailbroken iPhone). If 2.0 is so diagonally different, offer an upgrade path to those of us who paid for the original. Let’s say, for $0.99. It isn’t the $2.99, it is the slap on the face.
October 10th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Alex adds this Comment:
I tried to do this last night for a full minute or two, couldn’t get it to work.
Apple doesn’t allow this, sadly. The dev has said he’d have done this if he could.
October 10th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Ken Scott adds this Comment:
Alex, if you tap the top menu bar near the carrier name it should scroll up. That’s a built-in iPhone thing.
October 10th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Bruce adds this Comment:
I’m with you in preferring the original version. Sometimes upgrades are not progress.
October 10th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Ok, after resetting the iPhone, the tap on the top to scroll up works again. Weird.
Regardless, keep my previous spot still tells me that I have a lot of tweets to catch up on. That isn’t what I’m looking for.
October 10th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Brian Arnold adds this Comment:
I can totally respect your approach and thinking of it that way, Tweetie 2 definitely isn’t right for you.
As I like reading every tweet I can (and being a bit lower profile than you, I can do that more easily — one of the perks of being a lesser-known dev?
), Tweetie 2’s resuming of exactly where I’m at when I get a call or whatever is pretty handy. Twittelator tries to do that, and does okay, but not great.
I’m curious how Tweetie will handle things when I have over 200 unread tweets – if it’ll just keep grabbing them back to my current position or not. I may just ignore the stream in that client until tomorrow afternoon to see what happens.
October 11th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Jonny hughes adds this Comment:
Bit annoyed that i paid for an app that i can no longer use. He could at least have left tweetie 1 on the app store for people to download again. If this becomes a habit. I will revert to jailbroken and use their ‘updates’ for free
October 18th, 2009 at 1:49 pm