Recently there is has been lots of innovation in App design for tablets. Apps like Qwiki, Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, Reedr have really figured out how to give a good user experience on a tablet. However, sadly, most twitter clients have not. Even iphone twitter clients like TweetBot are better than most iPad twitter clients as they are more optimised for the display size. The fundamental problem seems to be that twitter client developers think that iPad is just a scaled up iPhone.
With the help of this thinking various successful iPhone twitter client developers have released new iPad clients which are nothing more than scaled up versions of their iPhone application, with some added iPad elements. For instance, the following screenshots are from Twitterific and Echofon on the iPad.
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As you may observe, over 90% of the screen it taken up by a single UITableView. IMO the UITableView is an efficient way to present of a list of items (or a stream of tweets) in a small display. It makes no sense however, to just adopt the same thinking on a larger screen. A better use of the iPad screen is made in TweetDeck for instance. It makes more rich use of the screen, as the following screenshot depicts. However, unfortunately, the TweetDeck app has some performance issues.
Recently a new bread of applications such as Flipboard and Zite have emerged. These applications enable you to consume information in a magazine like fashion. I believe they too are an efficient way to consume your twitter feed and lists however they are not design to be full fledged clients. I believe there is a gap in the iPad App market for twitter clients that make rich use of the screen yet do so in a computationally efficient manner.
If you are aware of any good twitter clients please post to the comments…
