From WebOSAppReview
[edit] Spaz
| Developed By | Funkatron Productions |
|---|---|
| Current Version | 0.5.10 |
[edit] Description
Spaz is an open source application that lets users take advantage of webOS's capabilites for a unique spin on Twitter.
[edit] Review
This review will mix my thoughts, along with those of Examancer, who gave me permission to pull information from the fantastic review he wrote on precentral.net.
Spaz is one of the two twitter clients currently available for the Palm Pre. Released by Funkatron Productions, Spaz is an open source client for Pre, as well as the Adobe Air platform. Starting up Spaz you first see that you can either login to your twitter account, or ‘Search & Explore Twitter’ without having to log in. Search and Explore lets you search the public timeline, and it provides links to current trending topics. I assume everyone downloading the app will already have a twitter account, but this is still an easy way to quickly see whats happening in the world.
Clicking log in, I see the ability to add multiple twitter accounts. This is great, because I use both @nickashley and @webosappreview. Spaz caches the tweets it receives, which means that when you log into your account it first loads from memory the last tweets you viewed from the application. It then queries for the latest information online.
The look of the interface isn’t bad, but isn’t the best either. It is a dark theme, and the hyperlinks can be a little hard to read against the background at times. Nothing terrible, but could be better. Clicking an individual tweet loads a new page with the tweet, and buttons to reply, retweet, direct message, or favorite. Clicking on the user’s picture pulls up their info, and gives you buttons to view that users’ recent posts, search for the user, reply to user, DM, follow, or block. Clearly all base functionality of twitter is implemented, which is fantastic.
Back to the main screen, we have buttons to send a tweet, view favorites, or perform a search. Also on the top right there is an arrow that pulls up a menu allowing you to view all messages, replies & direct messages, just replies, or just direct messages. I think the ability to see both replies & DMs at once is kinda cool.
Spaz does an excellent job managing your timeline, as explained by Examancer:
Spaz also handles timeline updates the best out of any twitter client I have used. You can configure Spaz to automatically update the timeline you are looking at however often you would like. When new “tweets” arrive Spaz puts them at the top of the list, but leaves the screen scrolled to the last tweet you actually read (since you last interfaced with the program) so when you go back to Spaz you can pick up right where you left off and scroll up to read the latest tweets in the chronological order they were received. Brilliant! Also, Spaz caches your tweets so the last ones you saw when you last used Spaz show up immediately upon logging in while it queries the server for new ones which I think is fantastic.
Well said! What I find interesting is Spaz will auto update your timeline while you are in the application, but as far as I know, will not notify you of updates in the tray if you are using another program (correct me if I’m wrong). Compare that to Tweed, which doesn’t auto-update in the application, but will use the notification tray to let you know if people mention your name even if the app is closed. (A full review of Tweed is coming soon).
I will also let Examancer explain the program’s downsides, since he covered them so well:
Another annoyance with Spaz occurs when switching between display modes. An example of this would be switching from viewing “All Messages” to viewing “Repies and Direct Messages”. If I am currently scrolled down in “All Messages” I will be scrolled down exactly that far when I arrive at “Replies…” This really doesn’t make sense as there are far more items in “All” than in “Replies” so if I am scrolled back 30 minutes in time in “All” I may be looking at tweets several days old when I switch to “Replies” and have to scroll up to see the recent replies. This should be changed to work one of two ways: either remember my scroll position for each view, or reset the scroll position to the top when switching between views.
Lastly, I have found myself accidentally logging out of Spaz quite frequently. I will often click through to a user’s profile, click again for their recent tweets, and then use the “back” swipe a number of times to get back to the main screen. It can be difficult to tell when I’m back at the main screen and if you use the “back” swipe on the main screen you get logged out. I don’t think this should happen. A back swipe on the main screen should do nothing or should minimize (zoom out to card view) Spaz. To log out you should have to use the Spaz menu in the upper left (where you go to set preferences).
Nothing deal-breaking in my opinion, but there is definitely room for improvement. Examancer and I both would love to see groups implemented, so that you can easily find the tweets most important to you. The best way to implement this would be a new card for each group. The previous version of Spaz allowed for multiple searches in separate cards, but that had to remove the feature due to memory leaks. So maybe there is a possibility they could implement this in the future. I would also love to see integrations with twitpic both for viewing and uploading, and would love a URL shortener as well.
Overall Spaz created a solid twitter client with a base set of features. Assuming more 3rd party integrations, as well as features and bugfixes in general keep coming, I think Spaz will prove to be a success. An interesting note is that Spaz is open source, so once the SDK is release to everyone, they may get some development help from the community.