High Order Blog

Twitbit 2.5 was submitted to Apple yesterday! Our previous two or three submissions were accepted much faster than they had been historically, so we expect that you’ll have it in your hands soon (maybe early next week?).  We’ve deviated from our tendency to introduce BIG changes in this release, but we are nonetheless excited, as 2.5 addresses two of our most common requests: configurable push notification sounds and saved timeline scroll position.

There are now 5 push notification sounds available in addition to the default. This feature is great for distinguishing Twitter messages from text messages and other notifications. Sounds are set per account so you can identify which account received a message before you even look at your phone.

As for the timeline, one design goal we’ve had is make the timeline in Twitbit simple and deterministic. For that reason, we’ve been reluctant to tackle things like read and unread tweets, syncing and tracking your timeline position. We also appreciate the value of being able to close the app without losing your place in a batch of tweets. Twitbit 2.5 doesn’t make the timeline complicated but it should make you a little less gun-shy with the home button. Specifically, we made two changes to timeline behavior. One, and this is independent of scroll position persistence, when new tweets are fetched and the tweet you’re currently viewing is still displayed, there’s no jarring change in the scroll position. Second, provided you’re scrolled somewhere within the first page of tweets, we will persist your exact scroll position. We think the new behavior strikes a good balance between simplicity, avoiding sudden display changes, and coping with interrupted timeline browsing.

Twitbit 2.5 also has a number small enhancements, UI refinements and bug fixes. Another more notable feature is an index on the person selection view. We’ll have release notes up soon! Stay tuned for the release notice and information about Twitbit 2.6!