Use Cases, Part 1: The Follow-and-Mute
August 24th, 2010Having written about some of our design decisions, now we’re going to change gears a little and talk about Use Cases for TweetAgora that you might not have considered. First up: “The Follow-and-Mute”.
When someone adds you on Twitter you can either follow them back, or not. If you’ve never met them before, your decision process is pretty simple: check out their bio, scan through their tweets, and if they seem interesting you follow them back.
Design Decisions, Part 3: Old-School (RT) Retweets
July 22nd, 2010Like many of you, when Twitter introduced the “new style” retweets we shook our heads. Their intentions were good: being able to retweet long tweets, ensuring that the original tweet has been unedited, and hiding repeat retweets from the timeline are all theoretically good things…but RT-style retweets got popular for a reason.
The ability to add personal commentary to a retweet changes the whole context of the interaction. Sometimes an original tweet only has retweet value when additional commentary is added. Asking a question, adding information, or expressing disagreement in an RT can be a huge conversation-starter. Sometimes it can be difficult to squeeze in extra commentary for longer tweets, but it’s usually easy enough to tweak the original tweet without losing the core message.
TweetAgora v1.2 is Live!
July 22nd, 2010We’re very pleased to announce that version 1.2 of TweetAgora is now available on the App Store!
• Performance improvements (much faster loading, updating, & scrolling)
• Fixes the randomly-occurring timeline crash
• TwitPic support (TwitPic is now the default photo service)
• Instapaper & ReadItLater integration
• Images enhanced for iPhone4′s Retina Display
• Native Retweets (option when retweeting long messages, with a Settings option to always use them)
• Bit.ly API support
• Increased font size options in Settings
• Tweet-length indicator now turns orange when tweets go over the RT-able limit (Twitter name + 5)
• Mute 12seconds, Blip.FM, and Plancast tweets (paid version)
• iOS4 fixes
• Tweets with images will now continue to send in the background when you switch apps
Give it a shot & let us know what you think!
Note: we’ve had a couple of reports of crashing on load – if this happens to you just go to Settings > TweetAgora > Clear Local Data
Design Decisions, Part 2: Large Avatars
July 17th, 2010One of the first things you’re likely to notice when running TweetAgora is that we use much larger avatar images than other Twitter clients (52% larger, to be exact). Rather than use the small-sized (48px x 48px) profile pictures that Twitter provides, we’ve elected to go with the bigger-sized (73px x 73px) images.
The reason we made this decision has to do with TweetAgora’s raison d’être: improving Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio. While we’re doing our best to provide lots of ways to filter the tweet stream, there’s no better filter than your own eyeballs. By using nice big avatar images, it becomes much easier to see who’s tweeting when scanning through the entire stream. It’s based on how the brain processes visual images (Colin Ware’s ‘Visual Thinking in Design’).
Design Decisions, Part 1: Manual Refresh
July 13th, 2010If 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!).
And now for something completely different…
July 6th, 2010Our good friend Michael Nus recorded our karaoke performance from last week, and made this great little video:
‘Come Together’ was an appropriate song choice for us TweetAgora co-founders, because Agoras are all about Lists, keywords, and people coming together! Enjoy the spectacle :)
TweetAgora needs love!
July 5th, 2010We hope you’re all digging TweetAgora! If you do, we could certainly use some help spreading the good word. Here are some links to TweetAgora around the web – so please: thumbs-up, rate, or write some (hopefully favourable) reviews!
•Rate & Review on the App Store
•Rate & Review on oneforty.com
•Click ‘I like this’ on StumbleUpon
•Click ‘I use this’ on iusethis.com
•Add to Delicious bookmarks
•Digg it!
•Up-vote on Reddit
Plus there’s always good ol’ fashioned tweeting!
(Thanks much for helping out)
v1.1.1 = Purchasing is back!
June 22nd, 2010Thanks to a speedy review process by Apple, version 1.1.1 of TweetAgora is now available on the App Store. This version fixes the crash that was happening when trying to purchase the full version in v1.1. So with this version, everything should be nice and stable.
Happy Filtering and thanks for all the support spreading the word about TweetAgora!
@mhp & @EtotheZ
v1.1 is Available!
June 21st, 2010Version 1.1 of TweetAgora is now available from the iTunes store! This update includes the following:
- Random returning to timeline crashes are now fixed
- The Formspring filter has been updated to use the new http://4ms.me URL scheme
- Hashtags and keyword searches can now be directly added to a filter or agora
- Adds the ability to edit your profile
- Badges are now shown for ‘verified’ accounts
- iOS4 multitasking-ready!
…there is one issue which managed to sneak through however, which is that the app crashes when attempting to purchase (*forehead-smack*). We’ve identified the cause of the problem and submitted an update, so hopefully v1.1.1 will be available very soon. Apologies for the inconvenience – technically you can purchase TweetAgora with v1.0 and then update to v1.1 without any problems…or you could just wait a few days for the fix. In the meantime, the good news is that you can enjoy the free version without those pesky timeline crashes!
v1.1 Coming Soon
June 17th, 2010Just a quick note to say that we submitted v1.1 of TweetAgora to the App Store reviewers on Friday. This update addresses the random returning to the Home timeline crash some of you may have come across, and adds a few new features (like the ability to add a keyword search to an Agora or to filters from the keyword search view, a fix for the recent formspring URL change, etc). Hopefully we’ll see it approved soon!
Update [2010-06-18]: v1.1 is approved and live, please update.