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:
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and a subtle timeline bar pops up along the right hand side of the screen, giving you a clear look at how caught up (or out of date) the tweets you’re viewing are.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.