For those of you that haven’t heard, Research in Motion has put out a limited pre-release of Twitter for BlackBerry. I’ve been playing around with it for a bit over a day now and I’ve got two words for it. Not Impressed…
Twitter for BlackBerry is a pre-release, so, it is conceivable that RIM will polish the app up a bit before they fully release it. Here is our list of 10 things they need to address if and when they do…
- Speed — I know that Twitter for BlackBerry is just a pre-release, however, the application is ridiculously slow. I currently have 4 Twitter clients installed on my BlackBerry Storm and Twitter for BlackBerry is, by far, the slowest.
- Send Direct Messages from Contacts — One of the really cool things that a BlackBerry Twitter client built by RIM should do is integrate into the BlackBerry’s messaging system. RIM should add a field for Twitter account to Contacts and allow you to send a direct messages directly from there.
- Add more options to “Notify on new tweets” — Currently, you can only turn on or turn off “Notifications on new tweets”. RIM should add options to notify only on Directs and/or Replies as well.
- Approve Followers — If you lock your Twitter account down you have to manually approve anyone who wishes to follow you. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way approve follower in Twitter for BlackBerry
- Cache Recent Mentions — It appears that every time your view the @Mentions screen you have to wait for the entire stream to be pulled down from the server. Like with the Home scree, the last 20 tweets or so should be cached.
- Differentiate Between Read & Unread Tweets — Make unread tweets a bold or a dark font color. Make read tweets a lighter font color. Just do something to differentiate between them
- Enable Clicking of a Tweet — When veiw Tweets in various streams, you can highlight the tweet or click on the profile image to take you to that Twitter user’s profile page, however, clicking on the Tweet does nothing. It too should take you to the profile page.
- Add A Refresh Keyboard Shortcut — There doesn’t appear to be a keyboard shortcut to refresh your view. (I there is, I haven’t found it yet)
- Adress Gerneral Stability — It isn’t uncommon for Twitter for BlackBerry to randomly lock up .
- Add Multiple Account Support — You shouldn’t have to install multiple Twitter applications in order to Tweet from multiple usernames..
I think the silliest thing is either the lack of notifying of replies or the fact that you can’t close the program… not sure…
Well you have to understand that Twitter for BlackBerry acts like Facebook for BlackBerry, it doesn’t close down, but at the same time it’s completely transparent unlike the other Twitter clients, and that’s what I like about it, and it isn’t a resource hog on my BlackBerry Bold 9000.
I agree that it’s quite silly that RIM didn’t have Tweet Replies as part of notifications in their first build, it’s kind of a bad first impression to be honest and I was completely surprised when I saw it missing.
What do you mean facebook for BB doesn’t shut down. It certainly does. It’s not running all the time.
I think it sort of runs in the background all the time “watching.” If you get an e-mail from Facebook, it sees it and makes it a Facebook notification which opens in the Facebook app.
Thanks for the clarification 🙂
To close the program out completely, you can go to Options and click the logout button. The program seems to be completely closed out at that point.
Unread twit highlighting wont do us any good if they dont make the twit reading window “clean” like ut/ss/tg
I 100% agree with this entire list, particularly the refresh list keyboard shortcut. Hear’s to a quick iteration and subsequent release!
Speed – That’s not an issue on my BlackBerry Bold 9000. It’s running as fast as UberTwitter on the Rogers Wireless 3G network.
Direct Messages – I agree, it would be cool to be able to send DMs from the Contacts and I am confident that RIM sees this as a huge advantage and will implement it in their coming builds….hopefully.
Twitter Replies Notifications – Why would RIM not include this in their initial build is a huge mystery. As I said before, this is kind of a bad first impression.
Caching Images – Both Facebook and Twitter for BlackBerry clients suffer when it comes to caching profile images. I have to wait quite a bit to get the user’s image which should be cached on either SD card or a dedicated portion of the BlackBerry drive. Come on RIM! Get your caching right for the love of God! And fix Facebook while you’re at it 🙂
Clicking a Tweet – I don’t know why you can’t click a Tweet, currently when I click it I go to another screen showing me that Tweet and the user’s profile at the bottom along with his location, mentions, followers, favorites, etc.
Refresh Shortcut – I pressed every single button on my BlackBerry Bold’s keyboard and couldn’t get it the Twitter client to refresh. I guess there isn’t one for this initial build.
Multiple Accounts – I doubt RIM will add support for multiple account. If you look at Facebook for BlackBerry, it doesn’t have multiple account support and I think RIM will follow that behavior in their new Twitter client. You would probably have to Log Out and then Log In with different credentials. I personally don’t mind that since I only have 1 account. For those with multiple account, I guess you’re out of luck.
Now that I think about it, clicking a Tweet may actually just be a touch screen BlackBerry thing. You have to actually click on the profile image.
Who cares? There is a million other twitter clients out there….