The Official Twitter iPad Uses “Windows” to Deliver the Full Twitter Experience

Talk about making use of the iPad’s screen! The Official Twitter iPad app takes just about every Twitter function and gives it to you on the iPad.

The Twitter iPad app does it via panes overlapping each other to dig deep into Twitter to handle just about any task you can do using Twitter. With other iPad Twitter clients, there was only so much information you could view on the screen before you were taken out of the current screen and into another.

With the Twitter iPad app, regardless of being in portrait or landscape, panes stay open so you can navigate back and forth from task to task using multi-touch gestures (swipe, pinch zoom, etc.), while keeping a sliver of the previous pane available to get back to. If you want to get all the way back to your public timeline, the main sidebar pane always stays visible (unless you maximize a link in a tweet or exit the app to view a site in Safari) so you can start from scratch. I could definitely see future apps from other developers cosigning on Twitter for iPad’s UI interface for their own app functionality.

Speaking of links, when you click on a tweet with additional content (like a photo, video, or website), your next window is a shot of the content (with the tweet details at the top) with full multi-touch capabilities available to navigate the content. So you can use the content similar to using the site if you were in Safari. If you want to maximize a link for example, the tweet information located at the top will disappear to give you a larger view of the site. Similar to other Twitter apps, clicking done will take you back to the original tweet. Or you can open up the link in Safari, thus leaving the Twitter for iPad app.

The nice thing about leaving the Twitter app (in theory) is that Twitter for iPad integrates with Safari, so if you find a link you want to tweet, you don’t have to copy the link, then open up Twitter for iPad and paste the link; you can add a bookmarklet that will take you directly to Twitter for iPad, shorten the link and prepare it so you can customize the tweet before you send it. I say in theory because after carefully following the instructions to get the bookmarklet into Safari, it would only open up Twitter for iPad and nothing else…womp, womp!

Getting back into panes – If you click a tweet with a link, and are now waiting for the site to load (if you’re using AT&T 3G like I was), but want to retweet anyway, Twitter for iPad uses panes to open up the compose pane and allows you to tweet, all while keeping the link pane up and loading. So in a sense, the new Twitter for iPad has multi-tasking capabilities built in as well.

Like I mentioned earlier, Twitter for iPad does make use of multi-touch gestures. Pinching a tweet expands the tweet to give you more information about the tweet and the user profile and swiping left to right expands and shrinks panes.

Overall, Twitter for iPad gives you tons of functionality without sacrificing on the user experience. The only dings I could come up with is that I couldn’t get the Safari bookmarklet to work (I’ll keep messing with it to make sure it’s not just me) and the fact that I can’t hit ‘enter’ to send a tweet like with other Twitter clients – I would like to see that as a settings option.

Similar to how Flipboard changed how I view my Twitter and Facebook feeds, Twitter for iPad gives Twitter a new experience on my iPad. So if you have an iPad, this is a definite download from the iTunes App Store. It’s free (and you should know by know how a Brotha loves free).

About the Author
Terrance Gaines is a husband, father and self-proclaimed Technology Evangelist who shares tech news, reviews, tips and tricks on his blog BrothaTech.com as well as other sites and in print media. You can also find him talking "all things tech" on Twitter @BrothaTech.
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