I have tried many different twitter clients on the iPhone and iPad. Although there are some highly rated ones out there for the iPad, nothing comes close to Twitepad. It is refreshing in how it does things differently to achieve things nobody has yet to. (This review is based on v1.2 but on 07Jul2010 v1.3 was released Twitepad blog.)

If you click on a link within your timeline, you still keep your timeline displayed and the in-app browser displays the page. Where this gets even more amazing is that you can click on as many links in your timeline as you want and they ALL go to the browser as thumbnails. Tap on any thumbnail to read that page, close it or just tap on another thumbnail. If the thumbnails are blocking your view, click on the downward arrow in the center at the bottom to hide them then reveal again when needed.

In the default view, just drag the timeline to the right and your mentions column appears…drag again and see your direct message column as well. There is an alternative theme you can load with “narrow” columns that shows one column at a time with the other column names shown as tabs up the left side. You can slide the columns back into hiding with your finger or delete them from view.

How many times have you not been able to check your tweets for awhile and by the time you try, you just get the latest 200. Some apps have an option to view more but you can’t even remember how far back to check since all your previously received tweets are NOT saved. Two more things that Twitepad does that I have not seen in other apps are: 1. all your tweets are kept unless you purge the cache yourself in the settings; 2. a double-line is displayed wherever tweets are missing, and a simple click fills in the gap! You no longer need to suffer from FMS (Fear of Missing Something) on Twitter.

Twitepad has the same features we’ve come to expect from other Twitter apps (eg save to Instapaper, use Bit.ly with your API key to shorten URLs) but does so much more than any other app. This is really the new must have Twitter app. v1.3, now available in the App Store, adds the only two features I was missing, the option to email a tweet to someone and use Twitlonger for sending longer messages. Even with those missing in v1.2, Twitepad was the best Twitter iPad app; it will now pull even further ahead of a mostly lacklustre and over-rated pack.

Technology

WholeLottaRob

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