RefreshingApps.com

Tweetdeck is yet another Twitter client built on AIR. Oh no I hear you cry I already have stacks of those. Well Tweetdeck is a new way to think about Twitter and I think you will like the way it approaches some of the issues associated with Twitter like following way too many people, Kevin Rose take note!

The primary concept behind Tweetdeck is the ability to group tweets together from people you follow. As an example I follow people who are AIR or Flex developers as well as photographers, designers or entrepreneurs. With Tweetdeck I can group together all of the people who would be posting about photography, another group for Flex developers and possibly another group for tweeters who live near me. Each group column created then filters the incoming tweets very much like an RSS reader, nice isn’t it.

Another really simple but useful feature of Tweetdeck is the timeframe slider. While Tweetdeck is open it is saving your incoming tweets to it’s local database which is great for application response speed and of course offline reading. The timeframe slider gives you the control to filter your tweets to only show those posted from 1 to 48 hours ago. Moving the slider between times dynamically alters the display with no hesitation.

You need to think of Tweetdeck differently to other Twitter AIR apps to see how it can really help you manage those tweets.

The search functionality now has an option for using summize for a global search. I regularly use this for monitoring coverage of freshAIRapps.

Tweetdeck is in very active development and I have seen the app since the very first pre-public beta and I can say that Iain is doing a great job taking feedback onboard and refining the app, so any thoughts or ideas post them here or Tweetdeck actually has a feedback service using uservoice.

Design eye

Visually Tweetdeck offers some interesting viewing options. You can go classic single column, a lovely full screen and two different column states that you can toggle between.

The UI is clean and uncluttered while tweets are easily read. I have previously given Iain some feedback regarding the UX and UI and I know that he is planning some of those into the future roadmap for Tweetdeck.

A few minor things I would like to see are coloured hyperlinks in Tweets to enable easy scanning for posts with links. Custom buttons for pre setting your favourite timeframes, like the last 24 hours or 2 hours. One thing I did miss from Twhirl was the shorten URL service button when typing a new Tweet, simple but could be a good gain for this app.

And just to throw something really complicated in the mix, how about custom themes or a theme engine, sorry Iain!

Technical eye

Built using Flex and ActionScript 3 together with various webservices like Twitter and Summize.