David Jack Wange Olrik

I have blogged about this weeks pick before but I never made it a pick of the week before. The recent update to Tweetie rocks, so if you are into Twitter¹ I suggest you head over to the App Store and pick up a copy.

The first version of Tweetie for the iPhone was cool, and even won an Apple design award. It was easy to use, looked nice and was very polished.²

Tweetie 2 raises the bar for all iPhone applications, not just Twitter clients. It has been stuffed with all kinds of new and useful features – but in a way that doesn’t make it feel cramped at all! The user interface is very polished³ and it quickly grows on you.

The feature list is too long to repeat here, so I’ll just mention a couple of my favorites:  Nearby tweets superimposed on a Google map, Pull to refresh⁴, Multiple drafts, offline mode and full persistence i.e the user interface is restored to the same state after a relaunch or a phone call.

Tweetie 2 also takes advantage of some of Twitters new features that haven’t been launched yet – I’m so looking forward to the new Geolocation stuff. @Twitter: You may release now!⁵

Oh… and Tweetie 2.0 for Mac will soon be released, and will feature sync with the iPhone version and other goodies!

1. And who isn’t these days? [↩]
2. Except for the refresh button that looked like it had been placed with a shovel. It had to be there and this was the only place it would fit, well kinda… [↩]
3. Some might say too polished, as in eye candy for the sake of eye candy [↩]
4. The ugly button has been hidden, and only comes into view when you need it – nice! [↩]
5. Pretty please! [↩]

I have written about App Store pricing before, and I still fail to understand the “We want free upgrades for life” and “Anything more than $1 is too much” mentality that apparently rules in the App Store customer base.

Tweetie 2 for both Mac and the iPhone have just been announced and the iPhone version will be a separate app from the “old” Tweetie. The fact that you’ll have to pay $3 again for Tweetie 2 made some people go bunkers and some even threw a hissy fit. Guess what… You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to! There are numerous other Twitter clients on the App Store – take your pick!

Tweetie 2 contains a ton of updates and new features and the “upgrade fee” is certainly reasonable. If Atebits was charging for bug fixes that would wrong, but as you can see in any of these blog posts this is clearly not the case!

Apple has an office suite that costs considerably less than the competitors offering, and each year they release a new version with more features that costs exactly the same as the previous version. – Where is the outcry about that?

I don’t get that people are complaining about $3 for all those new features – for all the effort that Loren has put into Tweetie 2. Tweetie 2 costs less than a Grande Cappuccino at Starbucks, do you also complain to Starbucks that you can’t get a free refill the next time you visit them?

Matt Legend Gemmell said it best when he tweeted this yesterday:

Annoyed you’ll have to pay $2.99 for Tweetie 2? If you’re willing to meet me in person, I’ll give you $5 and hit you in the face.

@mattgemmell

Seriously people, wake up! There are more dire and important things wrong in the universe that are worth getting this upset about!

I for one will buy Tweetie 2 when it gets approved on the App Store!

When I started writing this blog post, it was called My top 5 favorite iPhone apps. But as I sorted through my installed¹ apps, I had a really hard time limiting my self to just 5 apps – so I changed the scope to “top 8″.

If I could only install 8 3rd party apps these are the ones I would choose. These 8 apps are the ones I use most frequently, and I couldn’t imagine living without them.

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1. I have 107 apps on my iPhone and a total of 144 apps in my iTunes library. [↩]