May 30, 2012
Quick Review of Quip iPad Twitter Client

So while you’d think that there’s nothing new that can be done in the area of iPad Twitter apps, you’d be wrong. Catching fire tonight is the Quip Twitter app from Glasshouse Apps. While it might not be what you would consider a “full featured” app like TweetBot, doing everything under the sun, it’s caught up the imagination of the twittersphere by being not only a solid overall twitter app, but having a couple of great hooks:

  • Conversation View: A splendid and amazingly simple implementation of conversation view that rivals all competitors both in the simplicity of how it works and how gorgeous it is. Tweet replies are threaded into a conversation, with icons of the avatars presented under the tweet. Touch them and the tweet re-jiggers itself into the full thread of the conversation. It’s a bit like how the Twitter website works, but much, much nicer.
  • Photo Viewer: A great photo viewer for images from people, taking some of the ideas of other apps (in the vein of “view all photos on twitter viewer apps”) and implementing it nicely into the UI. Touch a instagram, twitpic, etc photo from the timeline and it pops up in a simple (and very fast) viewer. Touch the images “stream” link on the left hand side and you get a big gorgeous view of all the latest images that have flowed through your twitter stream.

There are other nice touches as well. Swipe right to left and a subtle timeline bar pops up along the right hand side of the screen, giving you a clear look at how caught up (or out of date) the tweets you’re viewing are. Landscape and portrait work great, and the left hand column has a nice set of pre-set streams such as conversation mode, lots of retweets, and the aforementioned photo view in addition to the standard home/mentions/messages/search icons.

The app is not perfect however. List support is missing, there are a couple of odd UI choices (pinching an viewed image will put it back into the grid view (you know what I mean if you use flipboard at all), but “un-pinch” (or whatever it’s called) won’t open up an image, and blocked users don’t get hidden from your timeline to name a couple I’ve found in the couple of hours I’ve been playing with it).

Overall this app gets a solid 4/5 from me and a recommendation to go forth and buy it now from the app store for the low price of $0.99 (CDN/US anyway). While it may not replace your main twitter client, it’s definitely something you’ll want to use more and more as a different and logical way to view your twitter stream. The dev team at @getquip seem responsive and forthcoming about new planned features and fixes which will no doubt eliminate my above minor quibbles.





Posted by Arcterex at May 30, 2012 11:45 PM