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]
Scroll position isn’t that bad, you can tap the top part of the screen to move to the top of the page.
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.
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.
Alex, if you tap the top menu bar near the carrier name it should scroll up. That’s a built-in iPhone thing.
I’m with you in preferring the original version. Sometimes upgrades are not progress.
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.
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.
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