There are a huge amount of Twitter applications over in the Android Market, so choosing the right one can be pretty confusing. While there are some good apps, many of them are, quite frankly, pretty terrible. When I used to own an HTC Hero, I was using Twidroid, but always wanted to try Twicca because of its sleek UI; alas, it was only available for Android 2.1 upwards, and my Hero was running 1.5. Thankfully, I sold that device and started using its big brother, the HTC Legend. Twicca was the first Twitter app I tried, and I loved it. I started using the official Android Twitter app when it was first released, and also tried some others including Seesmic and Plume (Touiteur), but I’ve always ended up coming back to Twicca.
One of Twicca’s killer features for me is its UI. It’s sleek and plain, and looks very sophisticated. One of my major gripes about the official Twitter app was the amount of unnecessary logos, icons, and animations all over the app’s UI; Twicca features no such thing. It’s very intuitive to use, and every action is somehow exactly where you’d expect it to be. One of my favourite features is the ability to select multiple tweets with a long press on the screen; I get a lot of @ replies on Twitter which tend to all ask the same question, so it saves a lot of time to select all the tweets, reply, mention each user in the tweet, and answer their question, instead of having to answer each individually. The ‘new tweet’ box also gives you options for adding your location, uploading photos and videos, and shrinking URLs. It’s also very, very fast; even when not over a wifi or 3G connection, things will load pretty quickly.
(Sidebar: Twicca also has a ‘light theme’, which is basically in complete contrast to the default dark theme; everything is white.)
I think it’s fair to say that Twicca’s features are fantastic. There are also several different plugins that you can download from the Android Market which enable you to extend the functionality of the app. For instance, I’ve installed the Twitpic plugin, which allows me to upload photos to Twitpic instead of (the default) yFrog. Everything you’d expect from a fully-featured Twitter client is here, from new and old retweet styles, video uploading, and trending topics, to Twitlonger integration for tweets over the 140 character limit. My only complaint about the app is that is still does not allow you to retweet protected users, but that isn’t exactly a deal breaker.
While there aren’t really any stand-out amazing features, it’s clear to see that the developers have paid a lot of attention to user experience, as a lot of the features are really useful. For example, ‘show user directly’ under the ‘more’ tab is a small addition, but comes in real handy when you just want to jump to someone quickly, rather than having to trawl through your followers, friends, lists, or search. The settings are also extremely comprehensive, even down to the fact that you are able to change the position of the post options box in the ‘new tweet’ box from bottom to top!
Twicca is a very nice app, and best of all, it’s free! I think it’s miles ahead of the official Twitter app, and beats my long-term favourite app, Plume. It’s a beautifully simple app that does its job well, without any fuss. I’d be perfectly happy to pay a couple of dollars for it, if they were to charge (after all, it’s apparently still in beta).