While a lot of people may mostly be using their iPhones to check the weather, the apps I use most frequently are the ones that connect to Twitter. Twitter’s mobile web experience is pretty awful and SMS is a complete and utter rip-off. But luckily, several developers have made some simple, slick apps for using Twitter on the device. My current favorites are Tweetie (iTunes link) and Twitterfon (iTunes link). Both offer rich interfaces for doing a range of things such as checking updates, retweeting and searching Twitter. But what if you only care about actually composing tweets? Than Birdhouse may be for you.
While Birdhouse dubs itself as a “notepad for Twitter,” upon using it, I think it’s more like WordPress for Twitter. The idea is extremely simple: You start it up and compose tweets that pop into your head. Birdhouse automatically saves these tweets in the “Drafts” folder, until you decide you’re ready to publish them. Anytime before you do that, you can edit them, assign a rating for how good you think they are (one to five stars) or delete them. Once you publish a tweet, it’s moved into your “History” folder. From here, if you click on a tweet, you can unpublish it from your Twitter stream.
You can’t check other users’ tweets from Birdhouse, because that isn’t the point of the app. It really is just a content management system (CMS) for Twitter on the iPhone. Whether a format that is limited to 140 characters actually needs a CMS is another story. But it’s one that the guys from Sandwich Dynamics, the creators of the Birdhouse app, explain humorously, if not exactly well, in the video below.
This app would have a lot more value if it allowed you to do timed tweets. That is, write a tweet and set it to publish at a certain time. The company hints that more features are on the way, hopefully that is one of them.
For now, if you truly consider your tweets to be works of art that need refining (and I know some of you do), you may want to check out Birdhouse. It’s $3.99 in the App Store (iTunes link). If you just want a faster way to publish tweets, check out JustUpdate (iTunes link) — it lacks the CMS features, but it’s fast as hell, and free.
[via Laughing Squid]