The creator of the very popular Twitter app Tweetie announced today that he hopes to submit the final version of Tweetie 2.0 to Apple this week. Loren Brichter detailed on his blog a mind boggling list of impressive new features have been built into the app. Tweetie 2.0 sounds like a heavy-duty tool for serious communication - in 140 characters of course.
Tweetie is already the mobile tweeting app of choice for geek rockstars like NY Times User Interface Specialist Nick Bilton, youth social networking analyst danah boyd, the TED conference's Leigh Ferreira and the Nonprofit Technology Network's Holly Ross. (Maybe you should try it too, if you haven't.) Below are ten forthcoming features that will make the new Tweetie knock your socks off.
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- Video recording and video tweeting.
- Live filtering your tweet stream for keywords.
- Persistent state, close the app or get a phone call and it will relaunch on the same page you left it.
- Offline mode - including offline reading, follow, unfollow and save a link to Instapaper - all your commands will sync back up when you come online again.
- A drafts manager lets you draft multiple tweets offline and then send all at once when you come online.
- Sync your twitter contacts with iPhone adress book, marking up contacts with phone number, email and more. The new user profile pages look quite nice.
- Threaded conversation display.
- More powerful "nearby" UI, using Mapikt and supporting Twitter's forthcoming geolocation metadata.
- Integration with third party apps Favstar.fm (know when people favorite your tweets), Tweet Blocker, and Follow cost (see posting frequency for users).
- "Peak" gesture when replying to a tweet, presumably an easy way to glance back at the message you're replying to. Sounds nice.
That's a whole lot of features, but Brichter writes that he's kept it all looking beautiful. "And here's the beauty of this," he wrote today, "just as Tweetie 1 proved that you didn't have to sacrifice usability for functionality, Tweetie 2 proves it again. Every single one of these features fits naturally into the user interface, none adds unnecessary complexity. It's arguably even simpler than Tweetie 1, all while being vastly more powerful."
Unfortunately, there's no support for Groups. Not in the iPhone or the Mac version of Tweetie. That's a dealbreaker for some of us on the desktop, at least.
If all goes well, the new version will likely be available in the first half of October. Come on Apple, let the new Tweetie on through!
Images from ChicagoNow.
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