Tweetcaster review
TweetCaster
for Android is the Twitter brother of FriendCaster which I reviewed
recently also. Tweetcaster is a Twitter application to work as an
alternative to the official Twitter application and is rather more
in-depth than most other Twitter applications out there. However,
it's ugly look and silly icons make this a Twitter application with a
lot of function but not a hell of a lot of form on its side. In this
review I'll take you over some of the highlights and lowlights of the
application and hope to help you decide whether you want to Install
it or not.
Okay,
let's begin with the menu: as with most Twitter applications you have
your Tweets (represented by the TweetCaster bird), your mentions,
your messages, your favourites and then finally your lists. All of
these are pretty standard tabs for a Twitter application and are each
represented with a little sign which pretty much gives away what they
are (so there's no learning curve.) You can also search and compose a
Tweet, which again is nothing new in a Twitter application but it's
nice it's there. However, with TweetCaster you can enable multiple
accounts which I know is becoming more popular on Social applications
on Android, but again, it's a nice feature to have if you have maybe
multiple Twitter accounts for a business you own and a personal
account too. Now to interact with a tweet, you simply tap on it and
up pops your options; if you have a link in the tweet you'll be able
to access this; you can also reply, retweet, favourite, retweet with
comment, see other tweets with the same hash tags, view any replies
to the tweet, zip it and see who retweeted the tweet. Now for me,
that's a whole lot of applications and I was a little disappointed
these popped out into a menu instead of opening the tweet up and then
giving you these options on a separate page as this method tends to
look nicer. When composing a Tweet, if you type in the @ mention sign
you can select Tweeters from the selection below. Also when composing
a Tweet, you can add your location, record the tweet, manually add an
“@” symbol, add a “#” sign and add any media such as pictures
and videos. You can also see current trends and the application also
recommends people for your to follow and you can find people nearby
who have Twitter and all kinds of crazy stuff you didn't know you
needed yet. As you can see this Twitter application has pretty much
everything you need, it's just a shame that it comes in a very
unappealing package.
The
application works well, the menus are all really easy to navigate and
everything appears to happen fairly speedily. The notifications,
unfortunately, aren't direct push notifications and so sometime there
may be a few minutes delay after the mention or message has been
sent. However, if someone is Tweeting you, surely it's not going to
anything so crazily urgent that you need to respond to it right away.
However if you are someone who takes Twitter as a serious form of
communication, I'd recommend the official application as that does do
instant push notifications.
The
presentation of this application is where it highly lets it down (if
you hadn't guessed by now.) The menu pop ups and ugly colours and
ugly symbols representing each tab really give this application a
cheap feel about which we don't want when you can compare it to the
Free TweetDeck application which is beautiful. However, within this
application you can change the themes again which is a nice addition,
but the themes are still rather ugly and they don't change the symbol
fonts or styles and leave a lot to the imagination. As you can tell,
I wasn't happy with the look of the application, HOWEVER, a lot of
you may not care about this as functionality has always been more of
a need from Android users over form. But I'm a very looks-centric
person and I prefer applications that look and work beautifully even
if they don't support as many features. In addition, you may find one
of the themes you like and now thinking about it, the “bubbles”
themes weren't too bad looking.
To
summarise, TweetCaster is for those users who absolutely love to know
everything about Twitter and those who absolutely love to customise
their applications. However, if you're a fairly moderate user of
Twitter, I would recommend something else as all the options in this
application may confuse you as to what you want to do.
Usability
– 8.5
Options
– 9.5
Presentation
– 7.8
Dependability
– 8.3
OVERALL
- 8.5
Thank you for
reading, below is a list of places you can follow me or ask me questions at:
Twitter: @luke_harkness
Facebook:
http://facebook.com/luke.harkness
Google+:
https://plus.google.com/106343103371060659790
Instagram: @luke_harkness
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