Posts tagged twitter

As of Thursday, I used the new Twitter application by R.I.M. For 2 days I had the occasion of  using every bit of it and make an idea regarding this early version.

Let’s not forget that since being announced by the early adopters lucky enough to be provided with a copy ( by R.I.M, by Crackberry and other sites/developers  hand-picked by R.I.M) lots and lots of tweets and blog articles have popped-up over the Internet driving the people in search of a leak which appeared promptly. Of course, you can never tell if this was done on purpose by R.I.M in order to get as much feedback as possible, or that the BlackBerry community is really, really powerful and we’re benefiting from that.

I downloaded this leak and except for the fact that it will expire on March 31st, it’s THE Beta used by everyone. So, what are the PROs and CONs of THIS build ( it’s important to highlight this as many, many users are disappointed and complaining about quality, U.I, bugs, lags, etc):

PROS:

• its very existence; R.I.M is committed to offer best quality applications to their customers and is not relying solely on its developers.
• the application is built in order to offer as much functionality as possible, that’s why at this moment it does seem a bit overloaded with features
• the notification system is great, allowing one to close the application once it’s done with it. You can launch it, read the tweets by going to your time-line, replies, DMs, profile & search functions and then close it down. It will notify you with a little “t” in the notification bar on the home-screen and integrate the messages in the BlackBerry Messages Application.
• upon opening the DMs, they will be marked with a little check, so you won’t have to comeback to them again.
• the ability to send links from the BlackBerry browser to Twitter in one click AND the fact that this function is integrated with the browser menu options.
• upon choosing automatic refresh, when in foreground the application won’t just unload the new tweets into the time-line causing the fast auto-scrolling of previous tweets, but producing a small notification bar on top of the tweet one’s just reading and announces “new tweets available”.
• after running it for two days I didn’t observe and RAM or battery leaks.
• scrolling 20 tweets is fast and the loading time for the new ones (on WiFi and 3G) is 3 to 4 seconds; it’s OK.
• being a native app, one can change font/size by going to Options/Screen-Keyboard.
• sports  a “conversation” feature allowing you to see your exchange of replies with someone else.
• includes the native shortcuts we’re all used to : “T” for “top”, “B” for “bottom”, “R” for “replies”. There are some more waiting to be discovered.

CONS:

• buggy, no caching so every time you go from one tab to the other it’ll lose time and data reloading everything
• upon exiting the application or even put it in the background, it will slow down the system causing unresponsiveness for more than 15 seconds at times.
• the Retweet function won’t work. There is a workaround by going to “Send To”, choosing “Twitter”, then “Tweet” and then finally editing and sending the tweet. Tiresome.
• OR if it’s true what some users are saying, the RT function does work but you can’t see your own RT (as in the official RT version), while others do. By logging in  your web account, you can find your RTed tweet. So is this a feature?
• no separate notifications for Replies and DMs as we were spoiled by all the others developers of BlackBerry Twitter applications.
• this trial will end March, 31st. I inquired by sending a public reply to @BlackBerry and I got a DM saying they can’t comment on how or why is going to end, but that I should definitely watch them. It’s probably going to be another build and we’ll get to be Beta-testers again? We’ll see.
• lack of push notification. I guess in this kind of application push is not feasible having lots and lots of updates to pull.
• OR when closing the application it will start pushing the new tweets. It might also run in the background and not able to see it – there are some application behaving like this.
• support for tweeting a picture from the Media Gallery would be nice.

Piece of advice: to disable the Twitter application, go to its menu and log off! Yes, a lot of people don’t know how to do it!