Word is out: Yesterday the iPhone developer scene’s well known Iconfactory released the long awaited Twitterrific Version 2.0.

Twitterrific has long been by far the most capable and well implemented twitter client available on the iPhone. Craig Hockenberry, one of the key minds behind Twitterrific, has received some great attention for the initial version. It therefore comes at no surprise that the moment this major version update entered the App Store all the usual suspects started to provide in-depth reviews, most of which are pure hymns of praise.

For quite some time Twitterrifc has been without any serious competition. Though many iPhone twitter clients made it into the App Store none of those lived up to the high standards Iconfactory had established.

The game changed with atebits releasing Tweetie.

One important feature of Tweetie was the support for multiple twitter accounts – something which becomes important if you start corporate tweeting and maintain a second private twitter account. In addition Tweetie came with lots of features that simply outperformed what Twitterrific delivered as part of the initial release.

I’m a pretty heavy twitter user. (By the way, please feel free to follow me!)

I’ve initially switched to Tweetie primarily for its multi-account support. Given all the advanced praise given to Iconfactory I’ve very much been looking forward to this new release.

With all the respect I have for the great coding the folks at Iconfactory do, I don’t understand the almost total absence of critical opinions I see when reading through the traditional iPhone app blogs. It seems a bit as if whatever Iconfactory does, must be considered perfect, innovative and exceptionally good.

I don’t agree.

I’m not doing yet another side-by-side, feature-by-feature comparison between the two. Iconfactory took a long time to learn from what atebits has done right and added a couple of neat features here and there. Sure enough atebits will catch up very soon. Overall it’s the (weak) twitter API which limits what can be done and what not.

I’ll stick with Tweetie. Here is why:

• For me Twitterrific kind of abuses one of the fundamental concepts established on the iPhone: Hierarchical Navigation Controllers. The iPhone Human Interface Guide describes some best practices and Navigation Controllers have become a de-facto standard for navigating through hierarchical data structures. Drill-down by selecting a table cell, roll-up by pressing the top left button. This pattern is widely available in almost all data driven iPhone apps. Not so with Twitterrific. I found the many different uses of top bar buttons confusing and they simply do not feel consistent. I’ve always felt slightly “lost” within Twitterrific’s navigational structure. Sometime they bring you back to a previous view, sometimes they cause an action, sometimes they invoke an action sheet. You never exactly know what will happen next. (Until you get used to, but hey, Don’t Make Me Think!)
   
• One could think that one of the goals for this new version of Twitterrific was to literally take the company’s name, Iconfactory, and transfer it into a design concept: There are just too many buttons and icons everywhere. There’s a second bottom bar full of buttons, there are buttons in the top bar and even when you enter some text, there are buttons and labels everywhere. I do understand that a lot of functionality had to be covered but overall the new UI feels way to crowded for me. In addition most of the icons did not allow me to intuitively grasp their meaning. Creating icons which deliver an instant semantic meaning is an art in itself. Iconfactory failed to do so many times. The “filter icon” and the “more-features-that-we-had-to-squeeze-in star icon” are just two examples of where things went wrong.
   
• I don’t know about you, but when it comes to application settings I usually do them once and then forget about them. I’ve got no clue why Iconfactory decided to make them the top most view of the navigation hierarchy. I constantly navigate “too far to the left”, accidently ending up on the settings screen.
   
• While a lot of energy obviously went into providing an overall polished look and feel of the (themed) UI, I’m recognizing a subtle lack of love for the details. A good example is, again, the settings view. If you touch the “Settings” navigation button which sits in the upper left corner, you would naturally expect the new view to be pushed in from the left. Twitterrific instead moves it in from the right and it does not push out the Sources view. I admit this is a subtle detail but it adds to the overall feeling of inconsistency and unnatural feel for an iPhone application.
   
• Probably the single most important issue I’m having with Twitterrific – and the single most loved feature in Tweetie – is Twitterrific’s inability to offer the landscape keyboard. The upcoming new iPhone OS 3.0 allows users to switch to the landscape keyboard in almost every application. (I’m not breaking any NDA here as this information has been made publicly available by Apple a while ago). The great engineers at Apple have recognized the difficulties people are having when using the standard portrait keyboard to enter more than a few letters in e.g. contact search. I love the landscape keyboard. It allows me to type as fast as on my previous BlackBerry smart phones. Because Iconfactory has chosen to add a fancy “hide keyboard” icon and lots of additional buttons to the text entry view, they do not support switching to landscape orientation. This is my personal no-go criteria.
   
• Another example for lack of love for the detail: What does the grayed-out star icon on the profile view do? Why is it there?
   
• Twitterrific allows users to configure actions for single-tapping, double-tapping and even triple-tapping the avatar which sits beneath each tweet. Unfortunately this does not work at all on any of the current beta versions of iPhone OS 3.0. Iconfactory states it’s a bug that falls within Apple’s responsibility. Funny coincidence: Just yesterday Apple announced that as of now all apps submitted to the App Store have to be fully compliant with the current beta of iPhone OS 3.0. Twitterrific is not. So if I want to quickly look up an author profile it requires three taps: Selecting the tweet. Tapping the star icon. Selecting author. Tweetie again offers a way more natural and consistent experience.
   
• I could not find any option to quickly jump to a user profile by user name. Tweetie has a “Go to User” feature where you simply type in ANY user name and it takes you directly to the users profile. Twitterrific can do so by searching for tweets of a specific author and then allowing you to view the author details. Way more taps than the two step solution available in Tweetie.
• It might be another iPhone OS 3.0 related issue but I could not find a way to get a list of followers/following. Neither for myself nor for any other author profile. Maybe the labels on the author view are supposed to be clickable and take you straight to such a list (from where you should be able to start following/unfollowing users yourself). If not I’m seriously missing this feature as managing followers is part of what I regularly do. Tweetie’s solution is simple and very elegant and makes managing followers a straightforward and easy task.
   
• Last but not least I had the impression that I’m reaching the twitter API limit (100 requests per hour) faster when using Twitterrific but this might be pure coincidence. Maybe Twitterrific reaches out to twitter a bit more often than Tweetie to present some consolidated views where Tweetie sometimes simply leaves out some info (which is not necessarily the better approach). Again, this might be pure perception.

Just to be very clear: I appreciate the work the Iconfactory developers have done. They showcase some very advanced UI Kit techniques and they might push UI Kit to its limits.

However, for me, an iPhone twitter client is not about showcasing what can be done. It’s all about productivity and usability. And this is where Twitterrific fails.

I’ll stay with Tweetie. I’d love to see some enhancements there, too, but I like the ease of use and Tweetie’s consistent implementation of navigating the implicit data structures of the twitter data model.

Feel free to comment. Hardcore Twitterrific fans are invited to flame this post as much as they want as long as it adds value to the discussion. :-)