When the iTunes App Store launched late June, one of the first applications I downloaded to my iPod touch with the 2.0 software update was Twitterrific [opens iTunes]. I use Twitterrific desktop app on my Mac and have always loved the clean simplicity of it. I downloaded the free version on the iPhone as there were some problems with the scrolling (not like butter) and I wanted to see what other apps would eventually come to the app store for twitter. 

Since then I’ve downloaded Twinkle, Tweetsville and Tweetie [all links open iTunes]. I wasn’t too keen on Twinkle thanks to it bugging me relentlessly to broadcast my location, but also because it’s not a dedicated twitter client. So, when I was out and about I’d have random people sending me messages through Twinkle who seemed to want to “hook up” with me – people who weren’t on twitter. I decided to give that up and move back to good ol’ reliable Twitterrific.

Then the buzz was all about Tweetsville. The UI was clean and iPhone-like (although a little plain and boring in my opinion) and the search/trends was an attractive feature. But this turned out to be the most sluggish app of all, taking an age to download tweets even over wi-fi. I paid £2.39 for it and have never regretted an App Store purchase more than this. After less than a week of using Tweetsville I was removing it from my iPhone. When you mention this on twitter then you get a barrage of recommendations of another really great app, but that’s what they said about Tweetsville. However, after seeing Stephen Fry commend Tweetie recently then I thought I’d give it a go – and at just £1.79 then it’s not too bad.

Tweetie is by far the best application for twitter on the iPhone that I’ve used, although I do have one negative which I’ll mention in a moment. Downloading tweets is extremely quick on opening the application – within 2-3 seconds…and that’s over 3G! It has a very attractive iChat-like UI and boasts features such as the ability to view twitter trends and perform custom searches which is something that Twitterrific doesn’t have. You can also follow and unfollow people directly through the app which is great.

Now for the negative that stops this short of getting a 10/10 from me: the image uploading to Twitpic. Tweetie compresses the image so that it strips it’s quality and uploads it showing as being posted from twitpic (in your timeline) and the image is in landscape mode. In Twitterrific when you upload an image to twitpic it isn’t compressed and shows that it’s been posted via Twitterrific in your timeline and the image is also posted in portrait mode as intended. Here’s an example…

Image posted to twitpic through Tweetie
Image posted to twitpic through Twitterrific

Same image but horribly compressed and rotated via Tweetie. If they work on this image posting method then I will use Tweetie full-time, no question. Until then I’ll be switching between Tweetie for tweets and Twitterrific for image uploads.

Edit: Tweetie 1.1 update [available today] fixes the upload issue and now posts in portrait along with ‘from Tweetie‘ in the timeline instead of ‘from twitpic‘. See the comments for more.