What is iCloud Sync?

With Tweetbot v2.2 or later, your mute filters and direct message read/unread status will be synced across all instances of Tweetbot. So if you mute someone on your iPhone, they will also be muted on your iPad. The same goes for direct messages. Read a DM in one place and it will be marked as read on your other devices.

Another feature of iCloud sync is keeping your timeline position in sync across your devices. This allows you to pick up where you left off reading in your timeline when going between them. In the past we’ve had Tweetmarker support which is a free third party service that allowed you to sync your timeline with any twitter client that supported this service. Tweetmarker is still an option for those who need it, however for everyone else, syncing your read position via iCloud is enabled by default. While it sometimes takes up to 30 seconds to sync, it works brilliantly.

What is the blue bookmark icon for?

This icon shows you the tweet that has been bookmarked as the last read position. However since this icon has confused so many people, we have removed it and will no longer show in Tweetbot v2.3.

I can’t get iCloud Sync to work at all. Help?

For most it should just work. But some of you might have altered the default configuration of Tweetbot and iCloud which prevent this feature to work properly. Here are a few steps to take:

• In the iOS settings, go to iCloud and make sure you are logged into the service (with the same iCloud account on both devices)
• In the iOS settings, go to iCloud and make sure “Documents & Data” are enabled. If “Use Cellular” is turned off, iCloud Sync may not work if you are not on a wifi network.
• In Tweetbot, go to your Settings -> Username (under Account Settings) -> Sync and make sure iCloud is selected on both devices for the same account
• If it’s still not working, try rebooting your device. The next step would be to try re-installing Tweetbot.

If you are still having issues, there’s not much more we can say to help besides asking you to try going through these steps again. We don’t have any access to iCloud itself so it’s hard to troubleshoot the issue any further.

• iPad graphics optimized for the new iPad’s retina display
• Streaming (when on WiFi with settings to disable it)
• The “new tweets” sound is now limited to mentions, DM’s, and new tweets via pull-to-refresh
• Double-tapping on the timeline tab button takes you to last read tweet before going to the top
• Improvements to the Tweetmarker service
• Camera+ 3.0 Capturing/Editing Support
• Bug fixes related to direct messages
• Many other bug fixes

Tweetbot for iPad is now version 2.1

Since we plan to release updates to both the iPhone and iPad apps in parity, we decided to bump the iPad version up to 2.1. Both apps share a lot of underlying code so it only makes sense that their version numbers are in sync.

Streaming

We are excited to announce streaming in Tweetbot for the iPhone and iPad. What is streaming you ask? Instead of pull-to-refresh to check for new tweets or waiting for the 5 minute auto-refresh to take place, tweets appear instantly in your timeline as they are published.

There are a few limitations to streaming which Twitter has put in place:

• Streaming only works over WiFi. Tweetbot will automatically turn streaming on and off depending on your network status.
• Streaming is limited to running on three versions of Tweetbot at a given time per user account.

iPad version ready for Retina

Tweetbot 2.1 for the iPad is now retina-ready for the upcoming new iPad. Just like you, we can’t wait to see how Tweetbot will look on the new retina display.

New Camera+ 3.0 Support

With the release of Taptaptap’s Camera+ 3.0, you can now use Cam+ to edit or take photos for Tweetbot. If you have Cam+ 3.0 installed on your device, there will be new options when you are in the menu to add an image to a tweet.

As with the original Tweetbot for iPhone, version 1.0 is about getting you a solid first version. We still have a lot of work ahead of us so we appreciate your support! We have a lot of great stuff coming in the pipeline.

We are anticipating some of you wondering why the app is not universal so let me briefly explain. As you know, releasing quality software takes a lot of time. We anticipated working on the iPad version for around 3 months. It turned out to be over 6. We love what we do, but the bottom line is Tapbots is a business and the end goal is for us to make a living. We are just 2 guys at this company both with a family/kids to take care of. We also think charging $3 for each version is fair considering most of the other universal twitter apps charge more. If you don’t have an iPhone or iPad, you aren’t stuck paying more for a universal version.

So that’s about it! We hope you enjoy the new app and we will be working hard on bringing you improvements. Buy Tweetbot for the iPad here!

So What’s New?

This version comes with many significant improvements to the Timeline and Direct Messages. Here are the major changes in more detail:

• Updated timeline view
  • Image thumbnails in timeline
  • Links now colored and single-tappable
  • “Retweeted by” bar now integrated and tappable
  • Cell colors adjusted for better contrast
• New direct message view.
• Redesigned “New Tweets” bar (Can be dismissed by tap and configured in Settings > Display)
• Timed auto-refresh (timeline, mentions, and DM’s will refresh every 5 minutes)
• Readability added as mobilizer service
• Much improved tweet replies view
• Links in user’s bio now tappable
• “Huge” font size option in Settings > Display
• Improved scrolling performance

• t.co url shortening support
• Mute filters
• Ability to email single direct messages
• Support for international hashtags
• Bug fixes

Twitter’s Native URL Shortening Service

If you’ve used any of Twitter’s native applications, you may or may not have noticed that URLs are shortened to a t.co domain name. This is Twitter’s URL shortening service. Starting with Tweetbot 1.5, this will be the default shortening service. We’ve also disabled all the other URL shortening services with the exception of bit.ly Pro, CloudApp, and the Custom option.

Why are we doing this? 1) Twitter now automatically shortens all URLs that are at least 19 characters long, even if your link has already been shortened. 2) Twitter’s shortening service shows the real URL in your timeline so you will know which website you’ll be visiting before tapping on it. This is a very good thing. 3) Twitter’s service is faster than a stand alone URL shortener, you’ll be able to post your Tweet’s without waiting for each to link to be shortened. There’s no good reason to use a stand alone URL shortener, other than for tracking purposes.

Mute Filters

This is probably our most requested feature, but I’m sure it will be replaced by something else. :) Mute filters are pretty simple. If you don’t want to see someone’s posts (or hashtag) in your timeline, just hold down on a person’s avatar (or hashtag) and select the “Mute” option. You’ll be able to select a duration of time that you don’t want to see tweets from them or with that hashtag. You can choose from 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or forever. You can manage mute filters in one of the last 2 customizable tab buttons.

Users will have no idea that you have muted them so if you feel bad about unfollowing people, this is a great alternative (although your filters are only used in Tweetbot).

There’s a few caveats to keep in mind. 1) Mute filters only work on your main timeline. They won’t work in lists. 2) If a muted person mentions or DM’s you, you will receive those.

That’s it for now. We are also hard at work on 1.6 and think many of you will be really happy with it as well. :)

• Added sleep time for push notifications (notification quiet hours)
• Option to receive push mentions only from people you follow
• When emailing a link, the subject is the page title if sent from a web view
• Blocking/Reporting for spam now deletes associated tweets from the timeline

State of Push Notifications

For those who still don’t know yet, push notifications have been opened up to everyone. We also want to let you know that push notifications have been running flawlessly on our server so we plan to keep this service free for our users.

Push Hiccups

Tapbots push notification system depends on Twitter’s Site Stream product. Twitter considers this a beta product and while we’ve found it to be very stable there are going to be hiccups along the way. Over the last few days we’ve experienced some issues with the Site Streams server going down and when this happens, push notifications will stop working. When their servers comes back up you may receive a number of notifications as our system tries to catch up on messages it may have missed while the streams were down.

We are also aware that some of you are still not receiving notifications. Make sure you’ve tried everything we’ve posted in our Tweetbot Q & A. If you are getting all notifications except for DM’s, let us know on our @tweetbot account. We are working closely with Twitter to iron out any remaining bugs. We appreciate everyone’s patience on this.

What’s Next

We are hard at work on v1.5 and will be bringing a new feature that has been highly requested. And no, it’s not twitlonger or an iPad version. :)

How do I access push notifications?

The push service works in Tweetbot 1.4.1 or later. To turn them on, go to the Tweetbot Settings (within the app). You should see a section called Account Settings with your account username. That’s where more settings exist specific for each of your accounts. Within that menu is the Push Notifications settings. Flipping one of the switches turns on the push service.

If you get a message saying you can’t access push, that means our beta slots are full and you have to try again later. If you get some sort of APS error message, that means you are still running 1.4 and need to update to 1.4.1.

I turned on push notifications, but I’m not getting anything.

• Make sure the push notification switches are turned on in our app
• Make sure you have notifications enabled for Tweetbot in the iOS system settings
• Try restarting your device

If you are still having issues, It’s probably a network issue of some sort.

Why does the app crash when I get a notification in-app?

You device is probably jailbroken and you are running some system hack/app that is causing tweetbot to crash. One that has been known to cause the crash is Mobile Notifier.

Where are the notification badges?

These are available in 1.4.2 or later. If you don’t see them, make sure you have the latest update. If they still aren’t working, be sure to check your iOS notification settings for Tweetbot. There’s a toggle for badges there.

What about options like muting push during certain times and only pushing mentions from people I follow?

These are also tasks that we will look into later. Remember this is an early beta and we just want to make sure everything is running smoothly before we get into the finer details.

Can I change the notification sound?

No, the sounds we are using are also used within our app. We want to keep sounds consistent so they are instantly recognizable.

Questions about push in iOS 5.

iOS 5 is under NDA and we aren’t allowed to talk about it yet.

So is this service going to cost us money in the future?

Hopefully not, but we don’t have an answer for this right now. Our goal is to provide this service for free to our users, but servers and bandwidth costs money. We will see how things go over the next month or two and have a better idea of how much this service costs us.

The push service isn’t working in 1.4. Provisioning profile issues. Human error. We are truly sorry. We submitted a new build with a fix that will work. We’ve politely asked Apple to expedite the process so hopefully the wait won’t be too long. But don’t feel too upset about this because the service was limited to 1000 people for launch anyways (read why here). Unless you downloaded it as soon as it was available, you probably wouldn’t have gotten access (at least not right away).

The Good News:

The good news is you’ll get another chance to get access when the update is out. :) Lets hope the approval process is quick. Yay?

But in all seriousness, we are truly sorry for the bad news. We know many of you have been waiting for this feature. But it’s still coming and soon enough everyone will be happy. Thanks for your patience and understanding that there’s always issues that come up when humans are involved in building things.

What it Takes to Have Push Notifications

From reading various Tweets and support email there seems to be an impression that enabling push notifications is a simple matter of flipping a switch. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to be able to implement push we need access to Twitter’s Site Streaming API. Twitter considers this API to be “beta” and only allows access to 3rd parties after an approval process. We first asked for access to this API a few months ago and were finally granted access recently. This service is very resource intensive on Twitter’s Servers so we fully understand why they are slowly granting access.

The Twitter Site stream can be thought of as a big tube of data that contains all the posts, mentions, retweets, and etc. for each account in the site stream. Each message that comes in from the site stream has to be parsed, compared to the notifications a Tweetbot user wants to see, reformatted for Apple’s Push Service and then sent back out. And of course to ensure the best user experience this has to happen very very quickly.

Now imagine the above process multiplied by hundreds of thousands of accounts…and well…it gets complicated pretty quickly. Any unintended delay can cause the entire system to backup and a simple bug could cause everyone’s notifications to stop working. We have to put in a lot of effort making sure that we catch as many problems as possible before we launch and quite simply that takes time.

Now that you know what’s involved, lets talk about where we are today.

Tweetbot v1.4

We just submitted Tweetbot v1.4 to Apple today. Here is the official change list:

• Experimental Push Notification Support
• Ability to publish text notes with tweets
• Selected tabs remembered when switching between accounts
• Ability to view someone else’s lists as tweets
• Various bug fixes

So Tweetbot Now has Push Notification Support???

Well…yes and no. Yes, Tweetbot 1.4 has push, but not everyone will have access to it as soon as we launch. We need to make sure our code will properly scale. If we let everyone access the service at once, any small problem on our part may cause the servers to crash. Also, Twitter has only approved us to monitor 10,000 accounts via their site streaming service. Their service is in beta and they need to scale properly as well. We’ll be working with them over the following weeks to increase this limit.

For launch, we are allowing around 1000 twitter accounts to access push notifications. We’ll be carefully monitoring performance and adding more users as fast as we can. To register your device for push, turn on at least one of the switches in the push notification settings. It’s all on a first-come-first-serve basis and if you have access to push and turn them all off, someone else may take your spot. We want to ensure that push works well for everyone and, while it may seem frustrating, we are working as hard as we can to make sure that everyone will eventually have access to push notifications.

If you are on the fence about purchasing Tweetbot, don’t buy it just because of push notifications. We aren’t advertising this as a feature until it’s fully working and accessible to everyone. We would like to continue to offer this service for free, however we can’t promise this until we know more about the long term costs. So for now, please remember this is a new feature, it may not fully work and you may not have access to it right away.

We will announce on Twitter as soon as Apple approves 1.4. Thanks for reading!

Marking Your Timeline or Direct Messages as Read

Tapping on the iOS time status bar at the top is the universal way to scroll to the top of a view. However you can also double-tap on the timeline or mentions tab button to scroll to the top and mark the lists as read. Double-tapping on the direct messages tab will mark all your messages as read.

Favstar in Tweetbot

Favstar is a popular site for tracking twitter favorites. You can view a tweet’s favstar details by going to the tweet detail and hitting the favstar.fm button below the author’s avatar. You can also view a person’s most popular tweets by going to a user’s profile, hitting the action (gear) button, and then on “View in Favstar”. Double-tapping on your profile tab button will show you your most favorited tweets on favstar. Finally, if you subscribe to favstar bonus features, you can award “tweet of the day” by holding down on the fav button.

See who Retweeted Your Tweets

Many customers ask if it’s possible to see who retweeted them. Just go to any tweet’s detail view by double tapping on a tweet or hitting the view detail button (the last button) in the tweet drawer. Tap on the Retweets button under the author’s avatar.

Return Quickly from Being Multiple Levels Deep

If you ever end up multiple levels deep in Tweetbot, hitting the back button 5 times to get back to the main timeline can be annoying. Instead, just hold down on the back button and it will send you right back home.

Location Options

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how locations work in Tweetbot. There are 3 types of location data and you can choose which you prefer most.

By default, turning on locations on a tweet will choose a Twitter Place. Most of the time this is a City. It does not give your exact location away on purpose. Many people like to provide a location stamp without telling everyone exactly where they are. This default option is for you. But there’s one caveat. If you live in a city/country that Twitter’s Places doesn’t support, it will default to the nearest known city. Sometimes this ends up being in another country. This is a result of Twitter’s Places not having data for where you live. If this is an issue, we recommend using coordinates.

Coordinates is another way to share your location. If you tap on the blue location button, you’ll see an option to select coordinates. This is for people who want to share their exact location. You’ll see coordinates when composing your tweet, but Twitter will return and display the city automatically if it can. It will also mark your exact location on the map. If accuracy is important to you, we recommend this option.

Finally, there’s an option to select points of interest. If you tap on the blue location button, you’ll be able to choose from various businesses or landmarks in your area. Keep in mind the results are limited to the POI’s that Twitter is able to provide. This option needs to be selected manually for each tweet.

Retweet from Another Account

Ever see a tweet that you wanted to retweet on one of your other accounts? Just hold down on the retweet button and select the account you want to retweet from.

Post from Another Account

Have you ever started to write a tweet and realize you are composing from the wrong account? Just tap on the title button to quickly switch the account you are composing from.

See What You Are Replying To

If you are replying to a tweet and need to recall something mentioned in that tweet, you can pull down in the compose area to view the tweet you are replying to.

Block and Report as Spam

Spam has become an annoying part of the Twitter experience. In Tweetbot, you can block or block and report as spam via the button at the bottom of a person’s profile. If you are in your timeline, you can just hold down on a person’s avatar and quickly report for spam. You should see a message letting you know the action has been completed successfully.

Keep in mind that since timelines are cached, the tweet won’t disappear when you block or report someone for spam. But you should not see future tweets from that user. If you want to force remove the tweet from your timeline, you can go to Tweetbot’s Settings and then to Account Settings and reset your cache.

Gap Loading

When there are more than 200 tweets that need to be loaded in your timeline, you’ll see a gap with a plus button. This signifies that there are tweets that weren’t loaded there. You can control which way the gap loads depending on the position of the gap on screen when you tap on it. If you like to read tweets from old to new, tap on the gap button when it’s in the top half of the screen to correctly load without losing your place. If you read new to old, tap on the gap button when it’s in the bottom half of the screen.

Services Galore

You’ve probably been to the Tweetbot settings dozens of times, but many miss the “Account Settings” section. This section allows you to customize various services for each twitter account. If you go to the Settings, look for your twitter account name under “Account Settings”. You can set which services you want to use for that particular account.

Mobilizer. Many turn this feature on without knowing what it is. Mobilizer strips images, javascript, and css from web page views so it can load content faster.

Reset Account Cache. This is a handy feature which basically purges all the cached tweets and direct messages in your account. This allows you to pull fresh data from twitter. If you blocked users and don’t want to see their cached tweets in your timeline, this is one way to do it.