The last few months we have been hard at work on our next application. It is called Tweets and
as you can guess from the name it is a Twitter application. Why another Twitter application when there are already a gazillion of
them? We couldn’t find one that worked exactly the way we wanted. When we build apps it is first because we want to make something work exactly how we want it to. Most of the Twitter apps in the App Store do some things really well but none fit what we were looking for…until now. We borrowed some ideas from things we liked in a bunch different Twitter apps then we added the things we thought were missing and put our own spin on it all. The result: Tweets – Twitter for the rest of us.

Tweets is designed to be a fast, useable Twitter client. Some of our design goals are:

• the things you do most often should be available in the least amount of touches possible (this one is pointed at most of the major Twitter apps. Having to perform 2 touches to click a link just doesn’t work for us. Twitter is full of links to websites, mentions, hashes (#somePhrase) and there is no reason why you should have to go to a second screen to be able to touch the link you want to go to.)
• simple is better. Twitter is a huge system and distilling that down to what is useful in a mobile application is very important.
• all actions should not need to be learned but should be readily apparent or easily discoverable even if it makes the UI a bit less ‘pretty’.
• settings should be dead simple, there should be few of them and changes to them should take place immediately even while still in the application
• maximize screen real estate for Tweets. Nothing extra should be present when on the main timelines besides the tweets you are reading and required navigation controls.  This one is huge for us.  Twitter is about the tweets, not the toolbars taking up tweet space.

An early release of Tweets is now being beta tested.  We have gotten some great feedback and we have a few new killer features going in before the big release in a few weeks.  We also have the first draft of the Tweets website live available at: http://www.prime31.com/tweets/ The screenshots will most certainly change as we nail down the UI as will the copy.  Watch here for more news sometime around the 25th of the month.