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Twibble, what a great name. Anyway back to business, Twibble is yet another Adobe AIR Twitter client that’s an addition to the existing lineup of services from Twibble. Basically Twibble is a service that adds location based info to your Tweeting:

Twitter is a great service to stay connected with your friends. With Twibble you can tell your friends what are you doing, and where you are!

The Twibble lineup, including Mobile application, is built around their API where you can get geocoded twitter timelines mainly in KML format. After reading all of the intro stuff on the site I was quite excited by the prospect of an AIR app, thinking integrated 3d rotating globe showing where my fellow Twitterers were sending their message.

Well there was nothing like that, the AIR client is basically just like any other AIR Twitter client with a few additions. There is a set of six icons to the right of each tweet. You can switch to see an individuals Twitter timeline or jump back to your own quite easily. There is also a button to see a users Tweets in Google maps, unfortunately in the latest version I reviewed this opened up Google maps in my browser then failed to load in the file from Twibble. I also tried the Java mobile version, but that kept crashing in my N95 8GB.

You do get the location underneath a Tweet which is not always visible in other Twitter clients. Oh what some people write for their location made me laugh eg. ‘the back of the class’ @drewm.

Design eye

It’s not a bad looking application with fairly small footprint. Hidden in one of the top icons is a 3d style card view, different but not idea for viewing Tweets as only one is visible at a time and the animation is clunky.

Some of the iconography is not immediately clear which means your hovering over them awaiting the tooltip to see what the function is. This problem was handled well by Snippage reviewed a few days ago, by using a context help bar that appears under the heading.

Technical eye

Twibble uses it’s own API and the Twitter API to get data for the app. The application as far as I can tell is built using Adobe Flex 3 with ActionScript 3.