Loren Brichter has announced that Tweetie 2 will soon be released for the iPhone and then the Mac, also saying on Twitter that Tweetie 2 was submitted to the App Store Tuesday night.
Loren wrote a rather detailed announcement on the atebits blog talking about the upcoming release. Tweetie is still one of my favorite Twitter clients and although I have been using Birdfeed, I’m eagerly anticipating the release of Tweetie 2.
Loren Brichter on Tweetie 2:
It contains a metric ton of new stuff. There is full persistence – not just caching tweets for offline reading, but remembering where you are in the app. You could be viewing a conversation of a tweet of a recent mention of one of your followers, quit the app (or get a phone call), and when you come back, the entire UI stack is restored.
Persistence may be Tweetie 2’s biggest feature, it makes switching between applications feel less like quiting and reopening and more like actually switching. That’s not to say that Tweetie 2 doesn’t have other new and fantastic features, because it does. There is now a full offline mode, meaning you can favorite, follow, block, and reply while offline and when you reconnect all of those changes are pushed to Twitter.
There is also threaded conversations, full landscape support, multiple attachments manager, drafts manager, new-style retweet support, Read it Later, Instapaper, etc. Like Loren said, a metric ton. Smoking Apples has a great write up of all the new features, including a slew of screenshots.
Now comes the question of price. Tweetie 2 will cost $2.99, even if you’ve already purchased Tweetie. There have been many writers complaining about the cost. Honestly it seems like they are just too cheap to drop $3 on an app that they will likely use everyday for a year, that’s just over eight-tenths of a cent per day. If you don’t want to spend that kind of cash then just don’t buy it. Tweetie 1 will work just fine for you.
A lot of work goes into upgrades like this, the core of Tweetie has been completely rewritten. I personally believe that developers should get paid for their work, I’ll happily lay down my $3 when Tweetie 2 hits the App Store.
Update 10/19/09: Tweetie 2
