Tweetcaster Steals the Android Twitter App Throne
By: @Hilzfuld
It’s that time again, time for a review of a new Twitter Android app. We have reviewed Seesmic, which we loved, then we reviewed Twidroid Pro, which we loved even more, and now we are reviewing Tweetcaster, which we love the most. So, what is so special about Tweetcaster for Android? Well, if I had to sum up the app in one sentence, I would say it is so nice that it looks and acts like it belongs on the iPhone, not an Android phone. The UI is truly stunning, the experience is unbeatable, and the features are many.
So, let’s first talk about the interface. The main screen in Tweetcaster is extremely appealing, visually speaking. The top of the screen shows your name with an arrow next to it. That is to help you know which one of the multiple accounts you are viewing now. If you didn’t catch that, Tweetcaster allows you to add multiple Twitter accounts, a nice feature.. Pressing on the arrow on top brings you to another screen, which is also designed beautifully. On this new screen, there are four collapsible sections. Accounts, which enables you to quickly switch to a different account, Trends, which brings up all the trending topics on Twitter, Searches, which enables you to search Twitter and save your searches for future reference (a feature I have not seen anywhere else on Android), and Nearby, which allows you to view nearby tweets based on your current location or manually adding a zip code.
Pressing the phone’s Back button will bring you back to the main screen. On the main screen, under the name and arrow, you have five nicely illustrated large icons. The main timeline, replies, DMs, Favorites, and Lists are all represented by nice pictures. The app responds quickly even though I am testing it on a pretty slow Android phone, and it all moves pretty smoothly.
When pressing on a tweet, a popup list is displayed with a list of all the possibilities including accessing the link in the tweet, replying, favoriting, or retweeting the tweet. If you press on the tweet for more than two seconds, you get an entirely different popup with different options including View Profile, Direct Message, Block, or Report Spam. Pressing the phone’s Menu button brings up a screen with a few more options. These include Jump to Top (Very important feature and missing from other apps), Refresh, People, which allows you to view your followers and following, Tweet Filter, which allows you to create a filter or a word that will show you the tweets that include that word (Huge!), and a More option. Pressing the More option brings up yet another list of options including Quick Follow, which allows you to manually enter a Twitter account and follow it, Refresh All, Settings, and About.
Then there is the Settings screen, yes I know this app is full of features, I told you! The Settings screen includes a lot of different customization options. The first is the theme, which has two choices, dark or light. You can select a URL shortener, an image upload site, how often the app refreshes automatically, what it does when you press on a link in a tweet, the font size, and whether background notifications are enabled.
That is the app and those are its options. Tweetcaster works flawlessly in landscape mode as well, which is yet another feature not available in other Twitter apps. The one complaint I do have about Tweetcaster and this is something that should not be ignored, is that the list functionality has one major flaw. Unless I am missing something and I do not think I am, you can only view the lists you follow and not the lists you have created. The way I personally use Twitter is via lists, there is no way I can truly follow 8,000 people, so I categorize them into lists and follow the lists. However, in Tweetcaster, I could not access my own lists, only the ones created by others that I decided to follow. This is most definitely a bug and not something the developer decided when creating this app, but it must be fixed asap.
All in all, this is a great app that will meet every kind of user’s needs whether they are a beginner or a heavy Twitter user like myself. It includes anything and everything you would want in a Twitter app and it does it in a very intuitive way. I especially like the press and long press feature for different popups. However, for me, the list issue is a deal breaker, and as much as I love this app, until they fix it, I might just have to resort back to Twidroid, but that’s just me. If you are not Twitter List dependent and just want an all in one Twitter app for Android and one that offers the best user experience by far, Tweetcaster is for you.
Our Rating: 4/5
Developer: Handmark
