Tweetbot 1.2.1, 1.3 and the State of Push Notifications
- June 27th, 2011
- 46 Comments
There’s been a lot of questions about what’s to come so here’s a bit of an update on what is happening around here.
Tweetbot 1.2.1
A little over a week ago, you should have gotten the 1.2.1 update. If you haven’t yet, you’d better get it soon. Twitter is changing the way users need to log into their service to make direct messages more secure. This required us (as well as all the other 3rd party clients) to change the login process. Basically we need to send you over to Twitter’s website to login and authenticate our app to access your account. That’s what 1.2.1 is all about. It should be a fairly painless processes, but we are aware that a few of you are having issues logging in. If you are having issues, here are some steps to take:
- Make sure your iOS system time is correct. Twitter won’t allow you to login if your time is incorrect.
- Remove all of your accounts and add them back again.
If you are still having issues, you can email us through our support page.
Tweetbot 1.3
We are submitting Tweetbot 1.3 sometime this week. We don’t know when it will be available, but we will announce on Twitter once it does get approved. Here’s what’s new:
- Improved multiple account switching
- Local trends (can be set in the account settings)
- Improved recipient selector when creating a new direct message
- Ability to copy, delete, and translate direct messages (swipe on a thread to delete a whole group)
- “Add to List” feature improved and renamed to “Manage List Memberships”
- Added “go to user” feature in people search (shows when typing into the “Search People” box)
- Gaps now load above or below depending on position of gap when button is invoked.
- Compose Tweet from hashtag (by holding down on a hashtag in a tweet)
- Drafts button now displays # of drafts.
- Support for Favstar (hold fav button to invoke ‘tweet of the day’, double-tap profile tab to see your own favstar page)
- Various bug fixes
Push Notifications
We know this is a big request and we are still working on getting a solution going. We’ve already explained how complicated and costly it can be to get it running as well as the ability to scale. But one thing we haven’t mentioned is the fact that Twitter needs to approve us for their streaming service. But getting approved is not nearly enough. Their streaming service is currently still in beta and they limit the amount of accounts we can stream so they can properly scale. So the bottom line is there are many components that have to come together for this to happen and we are working on it. It’s not a matter of turning on a switch and having it working for everyone. Complaints and bad reviews because of lack of push won’t make it happen any faster. :)
Tweetbot for iPad and Mac
Even though we answer this all the time, I figured I’d mention it again. At this time, we have no plans for an iPad or Mac version of the app. That’s not to say it won’t ever happen. Twitter is just a shaky platform for 3rd party developers right now and we don’t want to dedicate a lot of time into something that might become a bad business decision. We are going to wait a bit and see how things go.
Twitlonger
Still not going to happen. It’s just not what Twitter is about and we don’t really want it in our app. But the beauty of the app store is if you really want it, there are 50+ Twitter clients that already have that feature. Take your pick! And no, we aren’t trying to be mean here. We are trying to build the best client experience we can for the majority of our users. We can’t and won’t even try to please everyone.
I am down with everything you wrote. TweetLonger shouldn’t be necessary. It’s not what Twitter is about. I totally understand about the iPad too. I have one and would love to see it, but Twitter Corp isn’t really giving you guys good reason to be investing time in that. Push Notifications would be awesome! But the explanation is very welcome.
Thanks for being awesome!
I would really like to see smoother scrolling. When zipping through the timeline, I notice a bit of lag. Hoping for a fix with this.
I really like these kind of updates!
Keep up the great work!
I like what you said about TweetLonger – but that said, then I have to call you out on adding “old” style retweets. That isn’t what Twitter is about either, and it’s the reason they implemented their own official way to retweet.
The old style isn’t secure at all. In other words, if I follow you and you have @Somebody blocked, I can safely retweet you and @Somebody will never see it, even if they follow me. Using the old style, it doesn’t matter who you have blocked – or even if your account is private – I am able to republished your words to the world, regardless of your preferences. Something to think about.
@Andru – The difference in the old retweet feature is that no matter what it’s called, it really is just a form of quoting. Anyone can manually type in “RT” in front of a tweet they copied so it isn’t really a big deal.
Regarding your private account comment, 1.3 disables the retweet button completely so you can’t retweet or quote a private account. :)
Don’t burn your brain too much about push, in fact, Boxcar works so well, that y’all better try to keep up with it. Boxcar pushes new mentions to me so fast that they won’t show up for around a minute in tweetbot after I’ve got the message, so please invest more time on that, than on push itself, cause it’s annoying to know that there’s something new waiting for a replay, but the client is just too lazy to show it.
Boxcar is so fast, who wants to reinvent the wheel? But a tweetlonger sometimes would really help out, whether it’s the meaning of twitter or not, wether you try or not try to satisfy your clients, in 98% of all cases I wouldn’t need that feature, but I don’t think it wouldn’t hinder anyone, it wouldn’t hinder tweetbot to be the best experience, if a message is longer than 140 chars, a message pops up and asks if we wanna use tweetlonger, I think actually that this could only improve tweetbot, and also I believe that this would take only 1% as much work from you to implement it, of the work you spend on push. And no, I won’t picky one of those 50+ clients, I was using twitter (formerly tweetie) already, but I bought your app, for 4.99, twitter is free, but I love tapbots, and I got them all. But this feature wouldn’t hurt anybody. But I think this is a programmers mentality nowadays, I read that excuse often, just, programmers just have a good life since the AppStore, and hey, I’m cool with that. Sometimes it’s good like that, if I think what happened to week cal, overpacked with a thousand features you can’t overlook anymore. But hey, we talk about a popup when you have more than 140 chars! Or do y’all just don’t know how to do it? ;)
But one thing is sure, tweetbot is such a good user experience, that I’m around 80% more tweeting than before! I really like the bots a lot, and promote them over here in Switzerland!
Sad about twitlonger! Alot of us talk in groups that after including everyone we can only fit a few words. That’s the main reason. Besides that I try to always stay under 140 char. :-/
Do you think you’ll ever get landscape mode for the timeline? And please get push! Other than that AMAZING app!
Sounds great! It’s the best twitter client I’ve used, there are only a few features I’d like:
1) filtering, based on hash tag and twitter client
2) limit the number of tweets you get, it seems to be about 200, less would be nice
3) post to face book, I know there are other options
I’d love to purchase this app. I love pastebot, but when are you going to make these universal for iPad usage?
Here’s to something does one thing really well!
I don’t need my washing machine to make coffee, I don’t need my car to view youtube, and I don’t need a twitter client adding to the barrage of random chirps and beeps my phone already admits.
Keep it up tapbots. Your apps are continually the best at doing what they do better than anyone else.
HaTTA said: “Sad about twitlonger! Alot of us talk in groups that after including everyone we can only fit a few words.”
I know twitter is used in many different ways, but I don’t think “talking in groups” is what Twitter is about either.
Keep up the good work, TweetBot has a permanent home on my iPhone.
As usual, great job with the post. Tweetbot has become not only my twitter client of choice, but my favorite iOS app. I don’t feel its necessary at all to come out with a Mac version of Tweetbot since all of your other apps are just iOS but the iPad version would be icing on the cake. However, I know I can’t have my cake and eat it too ;)
I love that you are insisting that you will NOT add Twitlonger support which is fine since I’ll just use Weet which works out perfectly. I 110% agree with you that twitter is 140 characters only and should stay that way but I find myself at times (very rarely) needing to use either Twitlonger or Twtmore to reply to someone efficiently.
Last thing I’ll add is that you guys should just take your time with the push notifications because boxcar is working just fine for me and will continue to until you guys add the support for push notifications. Now with that said, people who complain that there is no push or this and that need to either A) go back to twitter for iPhone or B) SHUT THE F*** UP and try to come up with a better twitter client. I double-dog dare them. sorry I got a little carried away but I can’t help it, I am head over heels with this app.
Also, one more thing I want to add is that how many developers do you know practically release a whole new app with each update. NONE!!! GO TEAM TAPBOTS!!!
KEEP UP THE AWESOME WORK GUYS!!!
Totally understand about iPad app. Still I’m a bit sad though.
Gary_S , there are a lot of multiple friends that I have or have meet since joining twitter and we all talk to each or jump in and out of convo’s. So twit longer is needed. What IF instead of of using twit longer that the app knows when you have gone over 140 char. And asks you to send in two tweets? Now that’s a good compromise! What you think tweetbot?
Follow me on twitter : iMaDHATTa
I’d love to see push notifications, but there are other options out there to get that. I’d really love to see an iPad version, but understand why you aren’t working on one. Sad really that twitter is putting you in that position.
Anyway, keep up the great work.
Keep doin’ what yer doin’ coz yer doin’ ‘t right
Screw push…
I am one of those sad about twitlonger. I retweet a lot of charities and like to add my comment for my followers too which has become so much work with cutting things down to 140. It doesn’t work most of the time which makes it a real pain. I think your app is the absolute best out there and i love it to bits but I will have to switch because it costs too much time.
Continue to rock – just for someone else.
Twitlonger would be nice to have, I swiched to tweelogix just for that. Another feature I would like would be to have ‘extra large’ font option so I could read the tweets without my reading glasses.
I love the app. As much as there are other apps that do so much more I keep finding myself using Tweetbot because it just WORKS!! I can see that a lot of time a effort has gone into the development and I can tell you that it is paying off.
Thank you for your answer about the iPad question- I’ll be waiting to download if it ever arrives.
For those of you who want push…. just use Boxcar?
Thanks
Guys. I love this app. I’d buy it again if I could :)
I use notifo and push.ly to get my twitter notifications and it supports Tweetbot.
excellent app, excellent updates!
can’t live without:
^^^ sorry for weird characters above. they were simply bullets (via iphone). you might want to determine why they don’t display properly.
Great article guys. Of all the Twitter clients out there that I’ve used so far, yours remains the most friendly and by far the most beautiful. For those people who complain about lack of push notifications, I’m sure this has been mentioned before but Boxcar works a treat and has proved to be a more than sufficient workaround. With regards to everything else, keep up the good work. Based on the work youve already done youve already got my full trust in your future endeavours.
Great to see development continuing apace. Just wondering though if you can clarify the new gap filling behaviour as I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “Gaps now load above or below depending on position of gap when button is invoked.”
For my money, the current gap filling (above) works great since the last update.
I’d like to see a feature so you could save tweets as favorites while reading offline. I have an iPod touch and read tweets offline often. I could save favorites with the official Twitter client when reading offline but not with Tweetbot. Otherwise, it’s a great app!
as you’re saying “Twitter is just a shaky platform for 3rd party developers right now”
may i ask [and remind you] if you are going to support status.net / identi.ca? it has a twitter compatible API [see http://status.net/wiki/API and i’m sure it’s FOSS developers will answer your questions.
this would be great! thank you. :-)
Seriously, i give damn to Push Notification as Boxcar works for me very well (if require, install Twitter for iPhone for that), rather Tweetbot should be made fast to open when a Boxcar Notification is clicked. About Twitlonger, even when we don’t need it 95% of times, it comes real handy when we are quoting someone with edits or replying to multiple people in one tweet, though we have Deck or Uber for that, it will be great if we can have it on Tweetbot so that we don’t need to use any other Twitter app than Tweetbot. Before Tweetbot, i used more than 10 twitter app to know which one was best but every app had its own strength and weaknesses but Tweetbot emerged as the most complete Twitter app. Even when having mostly all Twitter related features its still so simple, easy and most importantly fast to use. Keep the good works going. Regards
Hi. I’m new to tweetbot after using a few other apps.
A few questions of features I’m not sure it can do -
a) can I mute a @user for a set time (liek on ubersocial)
b) on a set timeline, is it possible to merge like on tweetdeck e.g. @user @user2 and #bbcf1 and #f1 all on one timeline
Really appreciate the frequent updates, and the explanations of why and why not certain features are implemented or coming.
Completely with you guys on tweetlonger. Push would be great, but I can see how it’s a pretty major problem. I dislike having to open boxcar to get through to tweetbot for notifications, but I suppose that’s a necessary evil at this time. But as others have said, would be awesome if the @replys and DMs would appear in tweetbot once the notification pops up. There can sometimes be a several minute delay between receiving a boxcar notification and seeing that in tweetbot, even with vigorous refreshing. But props to boxcar on speedy notifications I guess.
Are you guys still planning on implementing filtering? Haven’t heard much about that lately, but that would pretty much complete the feature set. I know it’s not really the proper twitter way, but stupid hashtags about meme’s and tv shows etc can get pretty cumbersome.
Keep up the good work guys!
Why did u guys removed the retweet of private accounts? Alot of my friends have their account privat and now I won’t be able to retweet them anymore…
You guys are doing things very well, congratulations. Keep on the same line for us. Thank You.
Keep kicking ass. You guys are doing great! I hope you guys work something out for push notifications, because that would just make Tweetbot that much more awesome.
I too would love offline faves. I use Twitter mainly to save links, and I have AT&T, so …. Enough said, I think. :)
I am happy to see an update on things. I do wish Push would be included soon, but I also understand the challenges.
My biggest wish right now is an iPad app. I hate using Tweetbot on my phone, Twitter on my iPad, and something else on my Mac. Anything to streamline that is great.
Filtering is must have (by hashtag, twitter client, or user). Mute functionality is wonderful and I wish it would become apart of the Twitter API.
I’ve just got Tweetbot today. The lack of push notifications put me off but I’m glad I googled it to find a solution. Now I’m rather excited about seeing the app develop further. It’s got such a cute interface!
Keep up the good work TapBots… I love TweetBot :-)
Hey, I was wondering if you guys ever thought about putting a user’s twitter avatar on the left of the timeline instead of the right, thus making the UI more streamlined. User’s tweets are already highlighted a different shade of gray so it seems redundant to have the avatar on the right side to distinguish them as well.
you guys are doing a good work. keep up doing it as awesome as you are doing it right now an keep the idea to develop an ipad client in mind!
What on earth do you mean by “Twitter is just a shaky platform for 3rd party developers right now and we don
@Nazo
Twitter has said that they don’t want developers to develop third party twitter clients. They’ve become less developer friendly. So while Tweetbot might be doing great right now, there may come a point where Twitter no longer allows any third parties to access their APIs to build twitter applications.
I JUST NEED PUSH NOTIFICATION THATS ALL :)
@HeezyBear
Thanks for your feedback, but I beg to disagree about what you said.
Just have a look at this official statement from Twitter, nothing there says what u are implying …
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/07/one-million-registered-twitter-apps.html
@ Nazo
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/twitter-third-party-clients/
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2011/03/twitter-tells-third-party-devs-to-stop-making-twitter-client-apps.ars
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381854,00.asp
Loveing the push notifications! Great app!
Couple of requests/ideas! – mute (allow to mute a user for a set time)
twit longer – comes in handy sometimes
photo preview – on time line the app pulls in a thumbnail of any photos in the tweet (allow this option to be turned on an off though)