HelTweetica review – Twitter client

Twitter clients are a popular market on the iPhone and that’s carried over to the iPad, with a number of iPhone clients already adapted or rebuilt for the iPad. Today we’re looking at a new offering, HelTweetica from Felt Tip Inc.

Price: Free!
Size: 0.7 MB
Format: iPad-only app

What It Has

The main area of HelTweetica features tabs for your main timeline, @ mentions, direct messages, and favourites, all of which behave in roughly the way one would expect. The timeline is a very information-dense screen; compared with some other Twitter clients there’s very little padding around each tweet, or whitespace within a tweet. I’m not sure yet whether I like it or not; it’s very utilitarian, but may lack elegance. Unlike many Twitter clients, HelTweetica is black text on white, which is great for readability.

There are a couple of usability niggles; for instance, you have to scroll back up to the top to see the tabs in order to switch to another view. The icons for replying, retweeting, DMing and favoriting next to each tweet are rather small, and closely packed. And there’s no obvious way to reply to a direct message without going to that user’s profile and writing them a new DM.

However, there are also some very nice features, such as the Conversation screen. When you hit an “in reply to so-and-so” link in a tweet, it takes you to a screen showing you all the tweets in a “reply to” sequence, with the tweet you selected highlighted. This makes it painless to catch up on a conversation in someone else’s timeline, and is a nice addition.

Accessing linked URLs is also a smooth experience; HelTweetica has a limited internal browser, and also offers the option to save the page in the ever-popular Instapaper, open the linked page in Safari, or email the link.

The menu bar offers a selection of more ‘advanced’ features: a profile selector (although you can, as you’d expect, also get to a profile by tapping their name in the timeline), a search function (including saved searches), a display of your lists and subscription to other peoples’ lists, an Analyze button (which renders your current timeline down into a list of tweeters by frequency), and the All-Stars feature.

The All-Stars feature is particularly interesting; tapping the button takes you to a page with the userpics of the people you follow. It’ll periodically search those people and then display a recent tweet from them for a little while, then repeat the process – the devs describe this as “a Twitter screensaver”. Unfortunately the (limited) controls over the display are tiny, and there’s no way to go from a userpic or single tweet to the user’s profile or timeline; you have to back out of the All-Stars display and then find them via your timeline or the profile viewer. That said, it’s a fun feature and might be an interesting way of keeping an eye on your Twitter feed, particularly if you follow a lot of people.

HelTweetica does offer multiple account support but keeps the accounts entirely separate; you select your active account from the “Accounts” menu (which is only accessible when you’re on your main timeline/mentions/DMs screen, not from within conversations or while viewing profiles or search results) and you can then only see that account’s timeline, lists, searches, and so on.

What It Doesn’t Have

Apart from the usability problems mentioned above, HelTweetica has a couple of other shortcomings.

The most obvious to many users is the lack of any URL shortening services, which are very common in Twitter clients. Felt Tip may be expecting that iPad users are less likely to want to tweet URLs compared with desktop users, but this lack is likely to be a significant hurdle if you do tweet a lot of URLs.

The second problem is another usability issue; there’s no fast way to get back to your main timeline view. This isn’t a problem if you don’t tend to follow links around the Twittersphere, but getting back to your timeline from other peoples’ profiles requires you to retrace your steps, which is time-consuming and annoying. A simple “Home” button on the menu bar would solve this, of course.

And, finally, there are no options for push notifications, which makes keeping up with your Twitter feed an all-or-nothing affair.

The Bottom Line

HelTweetica is an interesting Twitter client with some really clever features. The usability hurdles and lack of URL shortening may make it less attractive to power users, but it’s certainly worth checking out, and for a free app it’s pretty powerful. (It’s also tiny for what it does, so if your iPad is jammed full, it won’t take up valuable space.)