Twitter has been getting a lot of attention lately – with its number of users growing exponentially. I currently tweet on two different accounts, a personal one as well as one dedicated for this site where I use to announce new posts and other topics related to our favorite Apple devices.
I have tried a multitude of different clients, both on the desktop as well as mobile where I eventually stumbled upon TweetStack and liked the idea that I could actually import my ’stacks’ from the TweetDeck desktop client into the application.
TweetStack is a full featured Twitter client, with the main selling point of being able to manage stacks. If you happened to follow a lot of Twitter users, you’ll start to get the idea of a clutter – lots of tweets, some useful, some utterly rubbish. In TweetStack-speak, stacks refers to groupings that you can create in order to minimize the clutter everytime you check your Twitter feed.
TweetStack’s stacks can be created from various sources. For a start, you could create a friends stack that differentiate tweets from specific people in your list. TweetStack also supports a search stack that lets you create a persistent stack containing the keyword that you defined. Any new tweets containing the said keyword shall appear in this list. Useful if you happen to be monitoring Twittersville for a certain brand, product or topic. Complementing the search stack is the TwitPic stack and location stack. Both are pretty self-explanatory. TwitPic stacks lets you look up photos from the popular Twitter picture hosting site that contains the keywords that you assigned, while the location stack lets you find tweets that are geo-tagged to a certain location. You’d be surprised to see people around your area with the topics that they discuss.
By default, TweetStack starts with only four tabs, all friends, replies, direct messages and favorites. You can add new stacks by hitting the plus (+) sign on the top of the screen. Once you hit the number of stacks than allowed by the tab bar, a more button appears, which would conveniently let you rearrange the tabs according to your liking.
Feature-wise, TweetStack does a good job in letting you check your Twitter feed. There’s support for multiple Twitter accounts, cached tweets for the days when you are not connected as well as follower and following management. Other Twitter functions like retweet (basically means passing on another person’s tweet to your followers) hash tags, conversation threading, profile views and URL posting are supported. However, trends, a Twitter function that lets you see what topics are currently being popularly discussed, seems to be missing from TweetStack.
All that being said, there are a lot of things to like about TweetStack as well as a lot of things about TweetStack that needs to be improved. One item I caught while writing this review was the fact that TweetStack does not support a certain special characters, like the less than symbol (<). A very minor anomaly, which I hope will be resolved soon. User interface wise, TweetStack uses the same chat bubble style, which you could probably mistaken for the SMS application on an iPhone. That is the only user interface that you get - most of the other Twitter clients are going crazy with themes (spell Twitterific), and I hope to see this implemented soon. I’d also like to mention about a few quirks with the user interface (especially when retweeting and viewing user profiles) which I hope could be fixed in an update.
Also, being fully-featured could have contributed to some complexities in the app’s usability – for instance, tapping on a tweet does not actually show you more details of the tweet like most other clients do. Instead, the application presents you with a slide-in menu that expects an input in order to proceed. This occurs also when I tap on the user’s profile picture which usually displays the user’s profile – however, TweetStack asks for my confirmation before doing that.
Minor quirks aside, TweetStack stands to be one of the more featured Twitter client that fights for every tweeting iPhone and iPod touch owner’s attention. It’s stacks feature alone justifies getting this app, reiterating the fact that it really helps you organise your Twitter feed into more manageable chunks.
If you don’t mind a cluttered Twitter feed, you’d probably want to look somewhere else for a Twitter client, or perhaps use the mobile web edition.
Otherwise, for a low price of only $2.99 when compared to other clients, TweetStack and its features stands tall within the iTunes Store. Once the above quirks and anomalies are fixed, TweetStack stands to stand even taller while every other Twitter client plays growing taller.
Rating: 3.0/5.0 Taps
App Data
App Name: TweetStack v1.0.3 | Developer: B1te Entertainment Ltd. | Purchase via: iTunes App Store @ $2.99 | Released: Apr 10, 2009 | Reviewed on: iPod touch v2.2.1
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