TweetDeck iPhone app #fail

All the hype around the TweetDeck iPhone app lately has been kind of bugging me, and the last straw is this article I read yesterday, frankly it’s bothered me.  It’s not up to me to decide what they think is a badass iPhone app, but they include TweetDeck in the list and the only thing they say about it is “obviously”.  Obviously what exactly?

Ordinarily I wouldn’t even say anything, TweetDeck is free after all.  Aesthetically it’s beautiful, and as an iPhone app in many ways it stands out as brilliant, taking advantage of the state-of-the-art technologies the iPhone offers, where as with other apps it can be apparent the developers haven’t quite been able to step away from traditional mobile app development and harness the power of the iPhone.  But it’s not just an iPhone app, it’s actually a Twitter client, and in that I believe it severely fails.

Yes it has some sweet features – manage multiple accounts (I think it’s the only free iPhone Twitter client to offer this), create multiple views (this is very cool), group those you follow together, and synching with the desktop client.  But I think it runs before it can walk, those features are way cool but it lacks the basics of what I need from a Twitter client.  It doesn’t scroll down to your oldest new tweet, what’s the deal there?  And the color difference between the new and old tweet state is barely visible to the naked eye.  A designer friend who has the app didn’t even realize there are different color states, and this is a guy that can spot an off pixel on a screen from across the room and one floor up.  The two colors are so the same it reminds me of that scene in American Psycho when they are all sitting around comparing how different their business cards are when they all appear to be the same off-white color.  So I have to actually remember the last tweet I read?  And even if I do remember I have to manually scroll down the 146 new tweets I’ve just recieved.  And all this applies again and again for the multiple columns.

And another area where the app fails is its direct message interface.  As far as I can tell it doesn’t even show your sent messages.  What’s the thinking behind that?  It should take lead from Twitterfon who does it perfectly and displays both sides of the conversation in speech bubbles with avatars just like an IM app.

I dunno why I’m choosing to be so negative about a free app, I guess that whole “obviously” thing really wound me up.  The desktop version is definitely badass, and they’ve put a lot of work into their iPhone app so why have such serious usability issues?  Maybe I don’t need a tool as powerful as TweetDeck on-the-go so I don’t appreciate it, I don’t have multiple twitter accounts and I don’t follow hundreds of tweeple so I can live without the grouping functionality away from my desk.  Personally I just use Twitterfon, it might not be as beautiful but I think it’s badass, obviously.