While my colleagues at Beautiful Pixels have all been using Tweetbot as their choice of Twitter app for the most part, thanks to its streaming feature and customizable notifications, I have always been in awe of the Twitterrific 5 user interface even before I owned an iPhone. Which is why it was the first app I bought from the App Store after setting up my newly purchased iPhone 5. One could say this 3rd party Twitter app was way ahead of its time in terms of design. Unlike most other apps, Twitterrific’s UI design and interactions weren’t jarring on iOS 7 and blended with the OS’s new design language quite well. It is mind-boggling how beautiful an app can be without the use of any fancy elements, just a minimal, awesome layout. With the release of iOS 7, Twitterrific 5 has undergone some notable changes to its design. Have they pushed the bar even further, or have they changed it too much to create a disconnect from its original fan-base?
Like most other apps and in line with iOS 7’s design guidelines, the status bar color in Twitterrific 5 now blends with either the light or dark themes of the app. Moreover, there’s now a hint of transparency on the top bar that occupies the user’s profile picture and the array of timeline icons and this effect is more visible in the dark theme than the light one. The next big change appears in the timeline — profile pics and tweets from your followers now appear to be segregated in two independent columns and the tweet text no longer wraps under the profile pics. This causes the individual tweets to vertically take up more area than before. The Home, Mentions, Direct Messages (DM) and New Tweet icons have also gotten a makeover — they’re now more inline to iOS 7’s system-wide icons, which simply are thin line drawings. This applies even to the ‘Reply’ and ‘Conversation’ icons that appear when you swipe either way on a tweet, or the ‘Camera’ and ‘Location’ icon in the new Tweet window. The ‘Mentions’ menu now color-codes tweets that begin with your handle. This would make it easier to focus on direct conversations people are having with you amongst group discussions that you may be a part of. A similar treatment is given to the DM menu, where replies from people are highlighted in a darker shade of Blue as compared to DMs where the last message was sent by you.
With this newly adopted design, Twitterrific 5 remains functionally similar to the earlier versions. The recently added ‘Today’ screen summarizes reactions to your tweets (how many Favorites and Retweets) as well as lists new followers for the day. The interface is quite spiffy as usual, except at a few places. For instance, there is a 2-3 second delay after you press the ‘Favorite’ or ‘Retweet’ icons and the Instapaper-powered ‘Reader’ mode also takes its sweet time to grab the prime content from a webpage, at times making you think whether you’ve actually missed clicking the button.
Twitterrific 5 is a fairly functional 3rd party Twitter client and worth the asking price. If you want to read more about its functionality, you should go through our original review here. Twitterrific 5 is a Universal app and available on the App Store for just $2.99. I personally preferred the earlier design to the new one. Not to say they’ve ruined it with the new update; but if I were to choose, I’d want the design that I originally fell in love with before the update.