Hands On with Twitterific for iPhone

Twitterific, from the Icon Factory, has been available for your desktop for almost as long as the social networking site Twitter itself has. Until now, iPhone users have had to either jailbreak their phones or use the web apps made for Twitter to feed their daily addiction. However, for those of you who have been waiting, Twitterific, with a native interface, is now available through the App Store.

Check out my first impressions after the break.

To begin, the Twitterific app for the iPhone comes in two versions. One version is free, but is ad supported, while the other doesn’t contain ads and is $9.99. That said, this is the perfect application to interact with Twitter. The first thing you must do is enter your Twitter account information so that you will be able to update and view all of your friends. After that, it works just like the desktop version.

The majority of the window shows your friend’s tweet list, and the bottom contains the toolbar. There are four buttons on the toolbar: refresh, post, information, and preferences. The first two are self explanatory, but the other two are where the magic begins. The information button is used to find out more information about the selected tweet. By clicking it, you will be taken to a screen like the one shown below. Your options are clear; you can favorite the tweet, reply to it, get more info about the user who tweeted it, and use the other basic functions.

Twitterific also contains a few preferences which can be seen in the image below. They are pretty much self explanatory. You can control to some degree how the interface looks and acts, and it is worth noting that the “Light Background” preference is only available for the purchased version. Not shown is the ability to choose which website you want to use when clicking an @reply link (mobile twitter, regular twitter, PocketTweets, etc). It offers quite a bit more preferences then most apps I’ve used so far, though, and that is good.

Besides these normal features, the Icon Factory does add some rather interesting ones. When posting a tweet, you can use the iPhone’s camera to easily take a picture, have it instantly uploaded to Twitpic.com, and then have the link automatically added to your post all in one step. This feature is definitely my favorite, and it works seamlessly. Another interesting feature is the ability to have the iPhone use your current location to update the location part of your Twitter profile using coordinates. Both are great uses of services the iPhone offers, if you ask me.

Another one of my favorite parts about this application is its built in browser. Whenever you click a link on the Twitterific app, instead of going to Safari, it stays within the app. This not only saves the time of having to switch between applications, it looks and works great. It’s a great addition that not many other apps have done.

Now that you have all the information to digest, I must say that this application is a must have for Twitter users. It offers all of the functionality you could ever want and even adds a few nice touches. The Icon Factory has also done a great job with the interface. Now stop reading this, and go download the app!

Product [Twitterific, Twitterific Premium]