We have started to feature some classic app on the iPhone for our App of The Week. Twitter is one of those essential app that is on most Twitter users’ iPhone home screen. There are Twitter clients from third party developers, but the official client is consistently one of the better ones. The iPad Twitter client is one of the first content apps that uses a three panes interface.

Twitter is the only popular social networking site that has dedicated clients for iPhone, iPad and Mac OS X.

Twitter for iOS

Twitter for Mac OS X

Many are using Twitter as a micro blogging tool, and many also find it a good tool to discover interesting web links and content. Twitter has a “favorites” feature where you can marked tweets as favorites. Marked tweets are saved into your “favorites” section under your Twitter profile. This “favorites” feature can be used as a convenient bookmarklet tool. When you’re out using Twitter on your iPhone, you can quickly mark a tweet as favorite for read-later. This might be the case when you’re busy or you prefer a more comfortable read on a bigger screen. And you can access Twitter on your Mac or on a computer with a browser.

To get started, you need to follow Twitter users who publish the links you want. In fact most web publishers now uses Twitter to alert of new article urls or blog posts. Simply visit their websites to find out the Twitter name. Or you can search the name directly from within Twitter.

Twitter creates an uproar last month when it introduces QuickBar into its iPhone app. It is a brown color bar that flashes the trending topics. The first release is irritating as it constantly flashes over tweets you’re reading, many view it as a mean of Twitter forcing advertisement via its promoted tweets. And it is labeled the #dickbar, courtesy of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. An update later removes the overlap and move the #dickbar to the top of tweet stream.

Twitter has released an update to Twitter iPhone client that removes the #dickbar.

“Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.”

Via Twitter blog

If you live by SMS for contacting your friends but your SMS telco charges is getting too high, you might want to consider Twitter as a replacement. This is especially so if your friends is overseas, since most telcos charge a premium for sending messages internationally. And Twitter is basically free.

By default all messages you send on Twitter is public. But you can use Direct Message for sending to your friends. In order for Direct Message to work, you need to follow your friend, and your friend needs to follow you too.

Certainly you can use WhatsApp or messaging apps for such purpose. But Twitter is free and behaves quite similar to SMS.

Apple has created a Twitter account for AppStore, to promote new apps and exclusive offers.

“Welcome to App Store on Twitter! Follow us to discover new apps, get exclusive offers, and share with friends. #appstore“

@AppStore

Bookmarklet allows you to tweet the link of the web page you are reading by just a click on the browser bookmark bar. Below is the bookmarklet for Twitter for Mac. Just drag it into the bookmark bar.

Post on Twitter

Source: Twitter for Mac Bookmarklet

With the new Twitter for Mac, you can easily tweet your photos on your computer by dragging it from Finder and dropping it to the tweet box compose window. The picture will be hosted by default at yfrog (which you can change from the preferences) and the character count will account for the shorten url of the image automatically.

You can also tweet using drag and drop from text and photos display inside Safari or Firefox. For text, just select the text you want to tweet and drag the selection to the tweet box. For image on web page, if the image contains a link, then the link url will be the text on the tweet box when you drag the image from the browser to the tweet box. If the image does not contain any link, then the image address url will be the text dropped inside tweet box. Instead of drag-and-drop to the tweet box, you can also drag-and-drop to the Twitter app icon on the dock to achieve the same.



Twitter now has an official client for the Mac. Twitter for Mac launches together with the new Mac App Store, and is now the number one title on the free app chart.

Twitter for iOS is updated to version 3.2.1 which brings push notifications and UI improvements. What’s new:

iPhone:

• Push notifications for @mentions and messages
• Improved display of shortened URLs
• Correctly load reserved Twitter.com paths, such as http://twitter.com/newtwitter
• Fix connection error caused by a device clock being set incorrectly
• Additional retina graphics
• Enable geotagging in your account with one tap
• Fix iTunes links

iPad:

• Inline media
• Manage saved seraches
• UI improvements

Twitter iTunes link

iTunes Ping finally is getting more social by integrating with Twitter. When iTunes Ping is launched in early September, the integration with Facebook was quick to be withdrawn due to Facebook and Apple not able to agree on terms. Today iTunes Ping finds a social friend in Twitter as the integration between the two is blogged by Twitter.

Starting today Ping, iTunes’ new social network for music, and Twitter are making it even easier for people to share music discoveries with their friends by putting Ping activity, song previews and links to purchase and download music from the iTunes Store right in their Tweets on Twitter.com.

Twitter + Ping = Discovering More Music