Despite the availability of some popular third-party clients, most iOS users prefer the official Twitter app for iPhone and iPad. Although the app has always had a rather simple interface, it offers all the features that make sure you don’t have to keep visiting the web version of the service again and again. So, even though most iOS and Android users were fine with the app’s interface, it has been updated to showcase some major UI changes (specially in the iPad variant) and the profiles appear in a new way as well. Instead of coming up with the same, old profile view, you now get a banner-styled display picture on all profiles. Another new addition is the photo stream, which arranges all the photos shared by the user in one list.Here are all the major changes that the Twitter app has gone through, thanks to its latest update.
UI Changes
If you use Twitter on iPad, you are sure to notice that the app has shunned the sidebar and when you tap any tweet, it comes to the foreground on the same screen. The iPhone and Android apps haven’t gone through any drastic change of this kind, and there are just minor tweaks in the interface. The Android Twitter client has received pinch-to-zoom gestures for photos, automatic search suggestions for people, hash tags and topics, better account management and lots of other bug fixes and feature enhancements.
Header Photos
The previous update of Twitter for iOS endowed the app with some really useful features, without tinkering too much with the interface, but the current update has done quite the opposite. The user profiles for everyone are displayed a little differently by the iOS and Android apps, and the top of the profile page is dominated by the display picture of the user. Unless you are on a tablet, the header area is subdivided into two parts. By swiping across it, you can alternate between the profile picture and profile description of the user. On an iPad, however, both the profile picture and description are merged into one view.
Photo Streams
Although it was already possible to view shared photos in one album in previous versions of the Twitter app, the whole thing has now got a much more refined interface. The new method for viewing photos shared by any Twitter user is called photo stream, and is located just below the recent tweets on a profile. You can browse through the thumbnails of these shared photos simply by swiping across the stream, and tapping on any image will open it in the app’s own viewer.
The removal of the sidebar from the app’s iPad version has annoyed a lot of users, as now you have to open a link to see what it’s all about and there is no preview option left. The developers of the app might argue that they sacrificed the sidebar to bring some extra simplicity to Twitter for iPad. The app remains free, and you can download it for your device from one of the following links.
