My New Favorite App – TwitterFon

Here’s a goodie for all of you who don’t want to jailbreak your phone. Not that I know why you’d want that, and not that anyone like that reads this blog, but hey. it’s totally cool regardless. If you have an iPhone, and you use Twitter, you flat out owe it to yourself to try out TwitterFon (coral). First of all, it’s free. Better than that, it’s open source. Rock on! Second, it’s very well featured, even having a companion bookmarklet for Safari to send the current URL to a new tweet. It can post pictures to TwitPic, as well as update your current Twitter location with your coordinates. More impressive, however, is how it handles the basic functionalities of Twitter. In your main feed, you can click a post on an arrow appearing if it has links, getting a menu of those links (webpages viewable in-app, or you can click a button to open in Safari, # and @ links also clickable in-app). If you click a post on the body, you get a menu specific to that post – you can view the author’s feed/profile, retweet the post, mark it as favorite for later viewing, and so on.

It’s got a few issues – it’d be nice, for example, if you could use the GPS feature to update your location more generally (town, street, something less specific than coordinates) or, for example, post a link to your location on google maps in the body of the current tweet. I’d also like to see URL shrinking – since TwitterFon has an infrastructure for importing URLs from other apps (mainly Safari), it makes sense that it should be able to shrink them. This is even more pressing now that there are at least two solid copy/paste solutions on the iPhone, and URLs can be easily imported from anywhewre.