technology

Another week, another Twitter app graduates to the home screen on my iPhone. This week's is iTwitter, which might have been round for a while but I only heard of it yesterday when it was incorrectly heralded as the first Twitter app with push notifications (it turns out that IM+ already does that).

I checked out iTwitter, only to be disappointed when I found out that you only receive push notifications if another iTwitter app user mentions or DMs you. If anyone wants to follow me and play with it, I'm @bitful.

The disappointment did not last long, however, as I discovered that iTwitter is an iPhone application with a very attractive simplicity that fits the way I use Twitter on my iPhone very well. That is, I want to do few things, and I want them to be super easy (and work well).

Main functions

The first screen you see is the last you were looking at upon quitting the application after the previous use. I tend to leave it in the 'Home' screen that shows your friends' timeline and only four options:

• refresh
• mark all as read
• delete
• compose tweet

If you tap on a tweet, a few options pop up:

• go to the URLs mentioned in the tweet
• reply
• retweet
• favourite

Very handy if you have large fingers like me and have trouble tapping on tiny icons or URLs.

You need to go up one menu to select, among other options, to view mentions and direct messages. Here you can also start a search, which can be saved and it will then appear on this menu. This menu also lets you access an address book with everyone you follow, and another with everyone who follows you.

Direct messages

The only way I found to send a DM is by tapping on a name in the Following or Followers address book, which involves too many clicks and is also confusing because as far as I know, you can only DM people who follow you. I haven't tried it yet though.

@Reply threads

iTwitter sticks the original tweet (with smaller font and avatar) underneath its reply, which I think is incredibly useful when people reply to you, especially if you tweet a lot and the replies are a simple 'Ditto' or 'LOL'. Unfortunately it only works if you follow the person who sent the original tweet.

Multiple accounts

You can add more than one account but you will have to move up to the top-level menu to switch between accounts. Again, not something I need.

I like this application and will probably stick to it. For the record, lately I have been using TweetDeck on the iPhone, which has a killer feature of displaying tweets grouped by whatever criteria you want. But I have recently unfollowed 40 accounts and I now get everything I want to read, nothing less, nothing more, so TweetDeck was largely unused.