On February 7, my first real understanding of the bushfires that day came not from the internet on my home computer, but through a Twitter client on my iPhone. That initial app actually was handy, but was eventually joined by a few more that added more functionality to the mix. And while most of my volunteer work on Twitter hashtags involved desktop programs like Tweetdeck and TWhirl, the few times I had to be away from my computer and still monitor things, it was the iPhone batch of apps that helped me stay on top of things.
My first ever iPhone Twitter client was Twinkle, a reasonably good app which covered the basics.
Twinkle Home Tab
Visually, Twinkle is quite colorful, with a nice, starry background and yellow tweet bubbles next to the sender’s icon. It has the usual home button, where you can view your friend’s tweets, then the messages tab. Unfortunately, this messages tab lumps all messages, both public and private, together. Entering a message in this tab gives you the option to send out a private or public message, but you really don’t know if the original message was specifically private. I can see some amusing moments using this program if the person you responded to wanted the conversation private and you sent out your reply in public.
Twinkle also has a tab for nearby people. For the most part, you can’t tell if these people are Twitter users or Twinkle-specific. If you’re only on Twinkle, you won’t find your Tweets turning up in a Twitter timeline. That’s the second limitation to this app.
A third limitation is in the next tab, Friends, as any people you follow here aren’t necessarily Twitter users. I have a fairly increasing list of followers in all other Twitter clients I use, but in Twinkle, I see only about a dozen friends. Most of these are Twitter followers, but one is a strictly-Twinkle only friend.
At least one thing I do like about the Nearby tab is that it allows a lot of varying range to be chosen, from a mere 1km to even 500km and 1000km, with the final setting being “everywhere.” If any of my country-dwelling relatives gets on Twitter or Twinkle, this will be the app that lets me know of their very first tweet, especially if I set the range to 500kms.
Anyway, for the purposes of keeping up with bushfire advisories back in February, it soon became apparent I needed an app with a tad more functionality.
My next choice of app was way more efficient for the use I needed it for, keeping track of what was happening in the bushfires.
This was actually a featured app on the App Store up till the past couple of days, when something to do with a swear word in a search caused the latest update to be rejected.
Tweetie's More tab and all the functionality.
Tweetie actually has a full range of features, including clearly-separated public replies and private messages, as well as a More tab allowing you access to your profile, nearby, trends and search, with your bookmarked searches or followers making up the final section of it.
As you can tell from the image, I had my key searches saved/bookmarked for quick access any time I used Tweetie and away from my desktop, this was my most-valued app.
As with Twinkle, the tweet composer is easily accessed at the top, so quick messaging out is quite fast, although you can still do replies and private messages from within any tweet or follower’s profile.
You also have options to repost a tweet (a slightly-different way of retweeting), post a link to a specific tweet, or even e-mail a link to that tweet.
Go To User enables just the tweets specific to any user. Trends is self-explanatory but also allows you to view the public timeline. Nearby, however has an opening sequence like a radar sweep, but only allows a maximum range of 100km. This is really its only drawback. I wouldn’t mind seeing the developers expand that range out to at least 1000km.
As you can tell from the image, searches and hashtags are in alphabetic order, not time added. Not shown in the image are the hashtags #fireupdates and #vicfires, which were the other ones I monitored and assisted with.
Yes, Tweetie was my most-used iPhone Twitter client.
I did use one other client which had MOST of the functionality of Tweetie, but which which handled some things in an entirely different way.
Twitterfon iPhone Twitter client, Home tab.
Twitterfon does allow threaded, IM-like private conversations, but you first have to access these via any private message you’ve received. Straight replies which are clicked on lead you to a page with the sender’s profile, then an option to look at a threaded conversation, with the rest of the profile page allowing you to reply, DM or retweet. Lastly, you can then look at the sender’s timeline, while the last feature on the page unnecessarily duplicates profile information.
Instead of a More tab, Twitterfon merely has a Search tab. Instead of clearly-worded Trends and Saved Searches, it has instead two icons on the Search tab, one actually inside the search field and the other to the right of the field. Not super-intuitive, but workable. To the left of the field is another icon for Nearby, with adjustable range between 1-500km.
However, as yet, I cannot find any icon or option to allow viewing of the public timeline.
Anyway, Twitterfon ranks as my second mosted-used iPhone Twitter client, with Twinkle running at third-place, even if it was first client I ever used.
How to get direct updates via RSS
Finally, though not a Twitter client, Free RSS Reader was an indispensable little program in the final two weeks of the Victorian bushfires.
While @cfa_updates provided most of the best updates on specific incidents and awareness messages, he couldn’t tell us in 140 characters if any particular incident was a false alarm, or a non-fire response.
I found it better to access CFA RSS feeds directly, those last two weeks, and occasionally tweet specific situations where it was necessary, not needing to cover any false alarms.
Free RSS Reader is a simple, but effective iPhone app. One plus icon accesses the fields for typing in an RSS url, but below that field, you can hit a field for direct web access, or even import from Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator or OPML. However, there is a limitation where you can only import the first three feeds via import function of these particular RSS services. All other RSS manages without limits.
As this last image shows, I could look directly at each CFA message and take a good look before tweeting relevant information. This particular feed covered Awareness/Alert/Urgent advisories. Another feed dealt with specific incident summaries, so I could weed out false alarms and non-urgent incident reports.
All in all, when away from my desktop computer, such apps on a great platform enabled me to stay on top of things and continue relaying important information, without any drop in quality. And in an emergency situation, that’s a crucial thing.
This entry was posted
on March 11, 2009 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Commentary, Melbourne News, gadgets.
You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
iPhone Tweeting…
On February 7, my first real understanding of the bushfires that day came not from the internet on my home computer, but through a Twitter client on my iPhone. That initial app actually was handy, but was eventually joined by a few more that added more functionality to the mix. And while most of my volunteer work on Twitter hashtags involved desktop programs like Tweetdeck and TWhirl, the few times I had to be away from my computer and still monitor things, it was the iPhone batch of apps that helped me stay on top of things.
My first ever iPhone Twitter client was Twinkle, a reasonably good app which covered the basics.
Twinkle Home Tab
Visually, Twinkle is quite colorful, with a nice, starry background and yellow tweet bubbles next to the sender’s icon. It has the usual home button, where you can view your friend’s tweets, then the messages tab. Unfortunately, this messages tab lumps all messages, both public and private, together. Entering a message in this tab gives you the option to send out a private or public message, but you really don’t know if the original message was specifically private. I can see some amusing moments using this program if the person you responded to wanted the conversation private and you sent out your reply in public.
Twinkle also has a tab for nearby people. For the most part, you can’t tell if these people are Twitter users or Twinkle-specific. If you’re only on Twinkle, you won’t find your Tweets turning up in a Twitter timeline. That’s the second limitation to this app.
A third limitation is in the next tab, Friends, as any people you follow here aren’t necessarily Twitter users. I have a fairly increasing list of followers in all other Twitter clients I use, but in Twinkle, I see only about a dozen friends. Most of these are Twitter followers, but one is a strictly-Twinkle only friend.
At least one thing I do like about the Nearby tab is that it allows a lot of varying range to be chosen, from a mere 1km to even 500km and 1000km, with the final setting being “everywhere.” If any of my country-dwelling relatives gets on Twitter or Twinkle, this will be the app that lets me know of their very first tweet, especially if I set the range to 500kms.
Anyway, for the purposes of keeping up with bushfire advisories back in February, it soon became apparent I needed an app with a tad more functionality.
My next choice of app was way more efficient for the use I needed it for, keeping track of what was happening in the bushfires.
This was actually a featured app on the App Store up till the past couple of days, when something to do with a swear word in a search caused the latest update to be rejected.
Tweetie's More tab and all the functionality.
Tweetie actually has a full range of features, including clearly-separated public replies and private messages, as well as a More tab allowing you access to your profile, nearby, trends and search, with your bookmarked searches or followers making up the final section of it.
As you can tell from the image, I had my key searches saved/bookmarked for quick access any time I used Tweetie and away from my desktop, this was my most-valued app.
As with Twinkle, the tweet composer is easily accessed at the top, so quick messaging out is quite fast, although you can still do replies and private messages from within any tweet or follower’s profile.
You also have options to repost a tweet (a slightly-different way of retweeting), post a link to a specific tweet, or even e-mail a link to that tweet.
Go To User enables just the tweets specific to any user. Trends is self-explanatory but also allows you to view the public timeline. Nearby, however has an opening sequence like a radar sweep, but only allows a maximum range of 100km. This is really its only drawback. I wouldn’t mind seeing the developers expand that range out to at least 1000km.
As you can tell from the image, searches and hashtags are in alphabetic order, not time added. Not shown in the image are the hashtags #fireupdates and #vicfires, which were the other ones I monitored and assisted with.
Yes, Tweetie was my most-used iPhone Twitter client.
I did use one other client which had MOST of the functionality of Tweetie, but which which handled some things in an entirely different way.
Twitterfon iPhone Twitter client, Home tab.
Twitterfon does allow threaded, IM-like private conversations, but you first have to access these via any private message you’ve received. Straight replies which are clicked on lead you to a page with the sender’s profile, then an option to look at a threaded conversation, with the rest of the profile page allowing you to reply, DM or retweet. Lastly, you can then look at the sender’s timeline, while the last feature on the page unnecessarily duplicates profile information.
Instead of a More tab, Twitterfon merely has a Search tab. Instead of clearly-worded Trends and Saved Searches, it has instead two icons on the Search tab, one actually inside the search field and the other to the right of the field. Not super-intuitive, but workable. To the left of the field is another icon for Nearby, with adjustable range between 1-500km.
However, as yet, I cannot find any icon or option to allow viewing of the public timeline.
Anyway, Twitterfon ranks as my second mosted-used iPhone Twitter client, with Twinkle running at third-place, even if it was first client I ever used.
How to get direct updates via RSS
Finally, though not a Twitter client, Free RSS Reader was an indispensable little program in the final two weeks of the Victorian bushfires.
While @cfa_updates provided most of the best updates on specific incidents and awareness messages, he couldn’t tell us in 140 characters if any particular incident was a false alarm, or a non-fire response.
I found it better to access CFA RSS feeds directly, those last two weeks, and occasionally tweet specific situations where it was necessary, not needing to cover any false alarms.
Free RSS Reader is a simple, but effective iPhone app. One plus icon accesses the fields for typing in an RSS url, but below that field, you can hit a field for direct web access, or even import from Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator or OPML. However, there is a limitation where you can only import the first three feeds via import function of these particular RSS services. All other RSS manages without limits.
As this last image shows, I could look directly at each CFA message and take a good look before tweeting relevant information. This particular feed covered Awareness/Alert/Urgent advisories. Another feed dealt with specific incident summaries, so I could weed out false alarms and non-urgent incident reports.
All in all, when away from my desktop computer, such apps on a great platform enabled me to stay on top of things and continue relaying important information, without any drop in quality. And in an emergency situation, that’s a crucial thing.
This entry was posted on March 11, 2009 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Commentary, Melbourne News, gadgets. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: Apps, Australia, Australian bushfires, gadgets, iPhone Apps, media, social media, twitter, Twitter Apps, twitterverse, Victoria, Victorian Bushfires
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