If you’ve been using TweetAgora, you’ll probably notice that we do things a little differently than some other clients. There is a method to our madness, so we’re going to start a series of blog posts to talk about why we do the things we do. In this first instalment, we’ll address the reason that we’ve decided to require manual refreshes on the timeline, mentions, and message views.
Unlike some other clients, TweetAgora doesn’t automatically refresh any timelines. There are a few reasons for this. The big one is that it’s we want to be a good mobile app citizen and save your battery life. Asking Twitter for timeline updates, mentions, and messages every X minutes is simply bad behaviour for a mobile device client. Those network calls aren’t free; you have limited hourly API calls, and we want to be nice to your battery (not to mention Twitter’s servers to help limit fail whales!).
Another reason is that you don’t always want to refresh the main timeline when starting the app. Sometimes you just want to send a tweet, check out an Agora, or see if someone’s messaged you. So why bother updating the timeline if you’re not going to look at it?
Finally, we don’t do automatic timeline refreshes because if you’re reading halfway down the timeline, what’s the benefit of refreshing the top of it? Once you get to the top of the timeline, it’s a simple drag-down (or shake) to get more tweets, and let’s be honest: even if we auto-refreshed every 5 minutes you’d still end up refreshing manually most of the time.
So there you have it – we think on-demand refreshes are the way to go, and hopefully you all agree! If not – hit us up in the comments area & we can chat about it some more.
First, I would like to say I REALLY enjoy Tweet Agora and I’m not even using it to its full potential yet.
Second, I would like to add two more benefits of manual refresh. The first is that there is no more of that annoying being halfway through a Tweet and your client auto-refreshes 15 tweets in your timeline leaving you lost.
The other benefit is for people who aren’t fortunate enough to have 3G, and have limited bars of Edge service is that auto-refreshing is REALLY slow on the system and causes everything to freeze up, especially if it is auto-refreshing in the background.
Cheers,
-Lucas
Hiya! I really love tweetagora. But ever since either the newest version OR my upgrade to iOS4 (not sure which came first), tweetagora has been so very sluggish.
On launch, I almost always get a 10-second blank white screen (I have timed it). After I drag down to refresh my timeline, it can take over a full minute to load new tweets. I have compared over and over again with Twitterrific to make sure it’s not a twitter problem. Twitterrific loads a new timeline within a few seconds every time, and tweetagora is slow as molasses in January.
When I click the “load more tweets” bar, about 3/4 of the time it turns blue for 10 seconds or more, then eventually turns gray and attempts to load more tweets, which, again, can take up to a minute.
Meanwhile, while time timeline is refreshing or more tweets are loading, the app stops responding to swipes and clicks, so I can’t even read the tweets that DO show, or type a new tweet, or anything.
Every time I get a pop-up message from Words With Friends, the app freezes and I have to quit it, even in the middle of typing a tweet, which is then lost forever.
There are frequent little freezes (for want of a better term) when doing anything at all. For example, if I click a tweet to see it better, there is often a freeze of several seconds when I try to go back to the timeline.
It frequently crashes on launch.
Posting pictures is so unreliable that I have stopped trying.!
Is there any chance that you might be fixing these issues sometime soon? Feel free to email me.
I have been putting off changing my 5-star app store review, but I think I really have to, since I wouldn’t like to recommend tweetagora in its current state :(
It’s a testament to how much I like the other aspects of tweetagora that it’s still my favorite (and default) twitter client!
Hi Kara, thanks for the feedback & sorry for the problems you’ve been having.
Version 1.2 of TweetAgora just went live on the App Store, and it adds a ton of stability & speed improvements (plus twitpic support, native RT’s, Instapaper/ReadItLater, more services to mute, etc). If you upgrade TweetAgora you should notice a big difference. You may need to go to Settings > TweetAgora > Clear Local Data to get the speed increases on loading (we lowered the number of stored tweets)
Thanks for putting up with our growing pains – we really appreciate that you’ve stuck with us, and please feel free to let us know what you think of v1.2!
Wouldn’t you know, the very day I get up the nerve to complain is the day Apple approves your new version and everything is fixed!
It’s working just great now — no stalling, no freezing, timeline loads fast, even uploading a picture worked!
The “load more tweets” bar does appear in funny places sometimes… this morning I read all of last night’s tweets, then refreshed to see if anyone had said something new. There was one new tweet, and immediately underneath it was the “load more tweets” bar. But It turned out there really wasn’t anything new hidden under there… not a problem, but I’m not sure it’s acting the way you want it to act :)
Glad to hear things are running smoothly now!
The phantom ‘Load More Tweets’ button occasionally appears when you’ve got a bunch of filters applied. It’s not ideal (and sometimes you’ll see them back to back), but it’s something we haven’t yet been able to figure out a fix for