From WebOSAppReview
[edit] Tweed
| Developed By | Pivotal Labs, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Current Version | 0.9.16 |
[edit] Description
NEW VERSION: Conversations, Url Shortening and more! Go to http://tweed.pivotallabs.com/blog for release notes. Tweed is the next-generation Twitter client designed to leverage the Palm webOS platform. Explore twitter trends and participate in the global conversation. Automatically be notified of new tweets. Did a plane just land in the Hudson? What just happened on Lost? With Tweed, knowing is always just a few taps away.
[edit] Review
A week ago I did a review of a Twitter client, Spaz. Well today I am reviewing the newly updated Tweed, another twitter client by Pivotal Labs, which competes directly with Spaz. ( I would like to note that the developers of both Tweed and Spaz are very friendly towards each other, and don’t see this as a client war ). Pivotal Labs is a software consulting firm based in San Francisco, who focus on agile software development, Ruby on Rails, Java, and now Palm webOS. Pivotal Labs became a launch partner at the end of 2008.
I already had Tweed installed, and configured for my twitter accounts. If you haven’t, it is a very easy process to Add an Account, you simply have to provide your username and password. Tweed supports multiple accounts. You set which one is the ‘default’ and Tweed will load that account’s timeline when you open the application. To access the other accounts, go to Menu > Open Account and then select the new Account you want to look at. Tweed will create a new card with the timeline. Tweed seems to load up and display my tweets very quickly. The interface gives you a text area to search tweets, your home timeline, and buttons to send a tweet, or refresh your timeline.
Clicking on an individual tweet pulls up a menu where you can Favorite, Reply, Retweet, or mark it’s spot in the timeline. It will also provide a menu item for all links, hashtags, and users mentioned in the tweet. Tweed will also display a ‘Show Conversation’ link if the particular tweet is part of a conversation. Clicking this will show you all back and forth tweets between both users in a conversation. This makes it very easy to see context for a tweet and know what a person is talking about. Clicking on a user’s picture will show all tweets for that particular user, as well as give you an icon to direct message that user if applicable.
Clicking the speech bubble button in the bottom left will allow you to sent a tweet. The text input has a character counter, so you know if you are under 140chars or not. Clicking ‘Insert Location’ will insert a tinyurl link to google maps, pinpointing your current GPS location. Very nice, and great for inviting people to wherever you are at.
The next button is ‘Shorten Urls’. This is a very requested feature, and I was happy to see it added. When I first tried it out, it didn’t appear to work at all. However the Tweed developers quickly informed me that because tinyurl urls are 25 chars, they only shorten urls longer then 30 chars. I was trying http://www.webosappreview.com, which is exactly 30 and thus not being shortened. I would love to see more URL shorteners added in the future, and I think bit.ly should be the default. Bit.ly provides 19 char urls, so Tweed could then shorten any URL longer then 19. Currently Tweed only shortens urls that start with http://. sometimes people shortcut urls by only entering 'www'. It would be great if Tweed could recognize and shorten these also. I would like to mention that I love how you simply enter your tweet as normal, then click the button once to shorten all urls in the textarea. This is much better then having a separate url input, and in that regard is better then even popular desktop twitter clients like tweetdeck.
Lastly, you may click the blue ‘home’ button to switch from your main timeline to viewing trending topics, favorites, direct messages, mentions, my tweets, and bookmarks, or the public timeline.
Notifications of updates are a big part of Tweed. According to their blog, the timeline will supposedly refresh every 3 minutes, without having to click the ‘refresh’ button. However this didn’t seem to work for me, at all. Maybe you can’t let the screen turn off, or switch to another application. Manually clicking the refresh button worked great though, as Tweed will add a ‘New tweets’ marker to let you know the divider between new and old tweets. This is a fantastic feature which makes it easy to make sure you have read everything, and that you aren’t re-reading messages.
Tweed also runs a background task every 15 minutes, that will alert you of new tweets. Clicking on the notification will pull up that timeline, which is something the previous version didn’t do. While this is a good thing, they made more changes, which completely ruined these updates for me. Previously this background task would alert you or new mentions, or direct messages. This was great. Perfect. I loved this feature. It was a perfect way to quickly see if people were trying to talk to me. However, in the new version, Tweed will notify you if you have new updates in your timeline. This means if any of the hundreds of people I follow say anything, Tweed will notify me of it. I guess that means I will get a notification every 15 minutes, 24/7 as I follow people from around the world, and at least 1 person in my timelines tweets in any given 15 minute span. This makes the feature not only worthless, but also will most likely be extremely annoying. Note that you can go into Accounts and preferences and turn notifications off, but I’d much rather have the old functionality back!
Overall, Tweed is a fantastic client. According to their blog, they are working hard on finding a way to support image uploads, a highly requested feature that apparently is difficult to implement using WebOS’s Mojo SDK. The fact that they are working on 3rd party integrations is great, as that is a big part of twitter for me. Tweed is working hard to provide a smooth twitter experience, and alerting you to everything that is going on. However, it seems to me they have completely failed in the updates department this round. They are still my preferred twitter client, and have earned their spot as one of my 4 quick launch applications. Hopefully the next version will allow me to only be notified of mentions & DMs. If they can pull off image uploading as well, it will be amazing.
What do you think of the app? Is there anything I missed, or got wrong? This is a big application that does many things, and I’ve only had it for an hour or so, so It’s very possible. I will keep notification on for a day or 2, and report back with my thoughts then.
Update 6/20/2009:
I had asked the Tweed developers some questions, but posted this review before I heard back from them. In retrospect that is probably rude to Pivotal Labs, and I appologize. I was just excited about the release, and to get something out there for you guys.
At any rate, they let me know that they had a TON of requests for adding home timeline notifications, and that is why they added them. They thought it was unfortunate that I (and potentially others) don’t like the new way it works. They plan on adding support for picking and choosing what types of notifications you get notified for in the future. They also mentioned the possibility of adding a “choose your URL shortener” type function in the future, but aren’t sure yet.
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