A slew of awesome iPad social networking apps are coming online that are taking great advantage of the devices great display and added space.
In this review, we’ll look at two free Twitter client for the iPad. Both of the apps are well established Twitter clients that are already available for both the Mac and the iPhone.
1- Twitterrific for the iPad
Among the social networking apps to first get an iPad update is the terrific free Twitterrific for the iPad [iTunes Store link]. I have been using it as my main Twitter app on my iPhone, so I was elated to see it come so quickly to the iPad.
When you download Twitterrific, the first thing you notice is how well designed it is for the iPad”˜s format. It makes great use of the extra screen real estate, and nothing about the app seems wasted in terms of the user interface.
Twitterrific contains all the features that you find in the browser version of Twitter, plus additional ones. In landscape mode, all the features of the app are upfront and accessible. In the sidebar, you can access all your tweets, Mentions, direct messages, searches, favorites, list and trends. What’s useful about this features is that these menu items are not hidden, and thus you don’t need to make several taps in order to access say your saved searches.
You also get a couple of tweet posting options. You can add photos from you iPad photo library and you can upload to other Twitter related services like Posterous, TwitPic, and TwitVid.
In landscape mode, the sidebar disappears but you can easily access with a single tap of your Twitter name. The menu bar items are there as well for sending new tweets and refreshing updates. The menu bar also includes a quick access to your Twitter account.
The free version of Twitterrific is of course ad-supported, but the ads are very unobtrusive; and to be honest, I’ve clicked on them more than I do on ads of most favorite websites. The only drawback to the free version of Twitterrific is that if you want to add multiple Twitter accounts to the app, you have to upgrade to the paid version of the app.
If you’re not a heavy Twitter user, Twitterrific is a great free app that you will want to have on your iPad.
2- TweetDeck for iPad
If you are a Twitter power user, I would suggest TweetDeck [iTunes Store link] for both your Mac and your iPad. As with Twitterrific, TweetDeck makes excellent use of the iPad format. And what’s unique about TweetDeck is that you can have several columns of tweet streams open at one time. So one column may consist of All Friends tweets, another of your Mentions, and few more of your favorite keyword searches.
And just because only three columns can be viewed on the screen at one time, it doesn’t mean you can”˜t have several more open; for all you have to do is slide columns to the left to see more of the.
Another cool feature is that when you tap and hold on a tweet, menu controls (reply, retweet, direct message, favorite) pop-up for easy access and navigation.
In portrait mode, you of course can only view two columns at a time, and the top half of the screen gets filled with a single tweet based on a selected tweet in one of the columns. This seems sort of redundant in my view, but for some users, it could be useful for better viewing of single messages.
TweetDeck has various other features, including tagging, geotagging, map links, and adding photos from your photo library.
Some users have complained in the iTunes App Store that TweetDeck has been crashing a lot. If this occurs, you might try shutting down your iPad and restarting it to see if there’s better performance. I haven’t used the app enough to gauge the performance in this regard.
TweetDeck is totally free and the developers have written about additional features for version 2 of the application.
So what Twitter client are you using on your iPad? Let us know how it’s working.
Tagged: ipad • ipad apps • twitter client
