How to use Tweetie for Twitter on the iPhone

This is a guest post written by Ben Gillam. Ben is a good mate, an IT professional, and an iPhone fanatic. He kindly agreed to write this post to kick off a new series of short pieces which will interest readers who want to know more about the gizmos and gadgets we can all use to make our blogging more efficient and fun.

It’s been said that the iPhone is the ideal device for Twitter, with its multimedia functionality and fantastic mobile browser, it allows users to experience the best of twitter without having to use a desktop computer and a number of Twitter clients have been released for the iPhone each with its own unique UI and style.

The current favourite amongst iPhone users is Tweetie and it’s now in its second iteration. Tweetie received a design award from Apple for its simple but effective UI which ties very closely into the iPhone look and feel rather than going over the top with a completely custom and sometimes confusing interface.

To get up and running first of all you’ll have to buy Tweetie from the app store, its very reasonably priced at £1.79 / $2.99 which is less than a pint of your favourite beer and you’ll get a lot more use out of it!

You can either do this direct from the App Store icon on your iPhone or via ITunes on your desktop.

Once you’ve got it installed go ahead and fire up the app and you should be presented with a screen asking you for your username and password for your twitter account. (if not hit the + button on the top right) Once you have completed this you should see your name and your avatar on screen which will confirm everything is set up. Press on your account name and you’ll be taken into the timeline view.

From here you can scroll though your timeline by swiping up and down the screen. New updates will periodically be updated automatically but you can also force a refresh to bring in new tweets, to do this swipe your thumb down until you reach the top and then swipe once more (as displayed on screen) and your timeline will be refreshed.

Individual tweets can be pressed to bring up a full screen view which will display in a bigger font and will also display any attached pictures. You can also swipe sideways across a tweet to bring up a menu that gives you access to common features, for example replying, re-tweeting, user profiles and flagging tweets as favourites. Additionally if you use a service such as Read it Later or Instapaper you can save attached URL’s into a list which can be downloaded for later viewing either on your desktop or using one the the dedicated iphone apps which comes in very handy if you check your tweets on the move but don’t have the time to check out interesting links. If you would like more information on these services I will be doing a roundup on www.funys.net shortly, so please drop by.

The second screen which is accessible via the icons at the bottom of the screen is the mentions/replies view. This will only show messages where your @name has been mentioned, all the same usage applies to tweets as it did for the timeline view.

The third screen will show you Direct Messages you have received. The initial screen looks very reminiscent of the iPhone SMS app, when you select a message you will get the familiar chat bubble/conversation layout of your messages backwards and forwards with your contact.

Next up we have the search screen, this area has received a lot of work recently with the Twitter service now allowing you to save previous searches on the main website and the new Tweetie client uses the same system, so searches you have made from the web will be available on your iPhone and vice versa, this is really useful if you want to keep track of a particular subject or hash tag. Also quite useful or maybe a novelty to some is the ability to find nearby users, this loads up a Google maps style map on your iPhone that you can navigate around and it will show you people in your local area that you can then choose to follow. Lastly on the search screen you can view the current trending topics on twitter.

The final screen allows you to see your own profile, your favourite tweets and draft tweets. Drafts are saved here when you cancel out of a tweet before sending or if a message fails to send, which can happen if you lose your mobile signal. The drafts view works much like your email program allowing you to finish or resend queued up tweets. I think this feature will be very useful for people catching up and replying to tweets whilst on the subway, messages can now be written and saved for sending when signal is available again!

If you want to change any of the default settings you will need to navigate back to the accounts screen by pressing the arrow on the top left you will then find there is a settings button at the bottom, this screen will give you more control over how the program works and gives you a wide choice of image, video and link shortening services you can use. As with most software the best thing to do is have a play around and try things out to get a good feel for how things work.

So there you have it a quick and easy guide to get you up and tweeting with Tweetie for the iPhone!

Ben can be found at his website Funys.net and he’s very active on Twitter @bengillam – he’s quite happy to answer any questions you have about Tweetie so go and find him on Twitter and say hello!