dianaschnuth

I’m taking a page from Garrett Murray’s playbook, and participating in Rate iPhone Apps Friday. In his words:

It’s that time again: Take 10 or 15 minutes out of your day today and rate/review some of the apps you use on your iPhone in the App Store. Most people have tons of apps on their phones, many of which they love, but we’re all guilty of forgetting or not bothering to review them in the store.

Today I reviewed Smart.fm (★★★★) and Echofon Pro for Twitter (★★★★).

Alas, I am discovering that, by using applications that my husband actually purchased and authorized me to install (up to 5 computers can be authorized, don’t ya know), I will be unable to write reviews of many of the apps I have installed!

So, despite the fact that that people who need to see these reviews won’t know they exist, I’m still going to write them anyway, and post them here on my blog, starting with Echofon.

Echofon Pro for Twitter ★★★★

Of all the apps on my iPhone, this is, hands down, the app I use the most. Of the Twitter clients I’ve tried, Echofon is my favorite, and upgrading to the Pro version just made it better. (Truth be told, it really just made it less annoying by removing the ads.) I’ve been especially enjoying the push notifications for mentions and DMs.

After looking through some of the recent reviews of the latest update (Version 3.0), it seems that I like the update much more than the average user. The main thing that bothers me about the update is the change from shading the background of new tweets to now only making the tiny arrow on the right display in blue. This is much less obvious at a glance — and recognition speed is important when each message is only 140 characters.

The other big problem I have with the update involves the inclusion of retweets in the timeline. I personally dislike the new official retweet method, and I ignore it as much as possible. Up until now, when someone I follow would retweet another person in the official way, I would go to that person’s profile page and turn off retweeting. I could do this before, because the only way I’d see a RT would be if I were already on the Twitter website. If Echofon displays retweets, it also needs to provide a way to either a.) turn them off per user, or b.) disable them entirely in the app settings.

Judging from user reviews, I expect that Echofon will be pushing out an update to the update before long.