I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed this yet! iTweetReply (iTR) is a great, homegrown application made by three slightly-geekier-than- average Aussie teenagers. The premise of the app is to give you simple, fast Twitter push notifications. iTweetReply started life as an emailing service developed by Matthew Lesh (@matthewlesh). Since the release of the iPhone app, this service has been discontinued. Lesh used the Twitter API to push email notifications to registered users who received @replies, which are tweets that contain your username with an @ in front of it, i.e. @MATT1604. The service was great. I signed up on day 1 and absolutely loved it. I was often missing replies that I received and often sending back belated replies. When I signed up for iTR, I would receive an email every time a tweet contained “@MATT1604”.
Anyway, on to the iPhone app. When Lesh heard about push notifications in the iPhone 3.0 update, he decided he’d make use of iTR’s capabilities alongside the iPhone’s upcoming push capabilities. He worked in collaboration with Matthew Roberts (@matthew858), who was the one-man team behind M2 Software, the developer who created Oz Hotspots. Matthew R. already had experience coding iPhone apps, whereas Lesh didn’t. Lesh did, however, know how he wanted iTR to work and how to get the API to do what he wanted. Lesh and Roberts soon teamed up with Tom Ricciardiello to design the app. The trio have since formed the company “Syncode”. Enough with the backstory, and on to the actual review. iTR is an extremely useful and quite well implemented application. As previously stated, it pushes notifications whenever you receive a new @reply. You may be wondering if it’s going to chew through your precious API. Well, din’t worry, because iTR is whitelisted, meaning no matter what you do with it, you won’t waste your API.
Now, you may have seen some apps that claim “Twitter Push Notifications!”, such as IM+. I’ve tried a few of these apps and can tell you first-hand that none of them do Twitter push notifications anywhere near as well as iTR. In my experience, some of these apps take upwards of 10 minutes to notify you of a new reply, whereas iTR rarely takes more than a minute. iTR is quite a simple application. It’s nice to look at and is easy to navigate, which is a major plus in any application. I should point out, though, that it is NOT intended to be a full-featured Twitter client, although, Syncode has hinted at some features in future updates that you see in popular Twitter apps, such as Tweetie. The current version allows users to open their favourite full-featured client directly from the pushed notifications (if they so choose), which compensates for the slight lack of features.
The application itself has 3 tabs; Replies, Messages and Timeline. Replies are obviously the @replies you’ve received, with the most recent being at the top. Messages is where you will find your Direct Messages, which also get pushed to your iPhone, and Timeline is where you will find your timeline of tweets from the users you follow.
See and download the full gallery on posterous
The UI is very easy to get used to and is quite straightforward. As with most Twitter apps for the iPhone, you simply tap the edit text symbol (the square with a pen) to start writing a new tweet. Something I really like about the app is that you can add recipients by tapping the + when typing a new tweet. This is especially useful for sending tweets to those users with hard-to-remember/type usernames. You can also add images to your tweets, both directly from the camera and from saved images (using twitpic).
See and download the full gallery on posterous
Overall, iTR deserves an 8/10. I only give it that due to the lack of some (for me) essential features. BUT, and that’s a massive “but”, iTR is still a young app and will inevitably develop into a great application that’s a must-have for all Twitter users.
Check out Syncode at http://www.syncode.com.au
Posted via email from POST1604 | Comment »
