Calling it a re-imagining à la Hollywood’s recent Batman movies, TweetDeck has released a redesigned iPhone app. The new version takes “the essence of what made it so popular” (TweetDeck that is, not Batman) and ses that to rethink the app’s design and functionality.
For those who use TweetDeck on your desktop computer, you’ll probably agree that that means a focus on columns. The standard columns are still available: Mentions, DMs, Lists and so on. But now you can also have combined columns (adding your Home, Me, and Inbox columns so you can see updates from multiple Twitter accounts you might have). You can also customize the appearance of feeds in your columns.
In these special columns, you can select which accounts you want to use and mix-and-match the feeds that appear them. For example, you can create a column that contains your DMs, your Facebook newsfeed, and a Twitter list. Or perhaps a Twitter search with Mentions.
The newly updated app also contains support for Deck.ly, which gives you the ability to send and read updates that are longer than 140 characters. As with the desktop client, you can choose to turn this feature off.
Just like the new Twitter client we wrote about a few weeks ago Tweetbot, this updated TweetDeck contains a number of new gestures: pinch inward on a column, for example, to acces column settings or tap the status bar to jump to the top of a column.
And as with Tweetbot, there’s an emphasis here on tracking Twitter conversations, giving you the ability when you view a tweet to see the related discussion around it.
These features all seem to make sense and are vast improvements over the older TweetDeck version. It’s certainly a sign too that there is still innovation happening around third-party Twitter clients, despite Twitter’s insistence that companies do something else rather than build them. Will the new TweetDeck app replace the official iPhone app on my phone? I’m not sure, but as as someone who relies on it on the desktop, I’m willing to give it a try.
TweetDeck says it’s working on an update to the iPad app too, which should be available in the next couple of weeks.
