Twitter released a free application for Apple's iPad on Thursday — and early reviews have left the tablet-owning tech nerds atwitter.
Take, for instance, the early look from Wired's Gadget Lab:
Loading and sending tweets feels almost instant, and the overall design is very pleasant. When you’re creating a new tweet, for example, the app brings up a notepad-style compose window, which is plain cute.
It also introduces some functionality we haven’t seen before: tap on a tweet with a link, and the content loads in a browser pane; pinch a person’s tweet to get more details on the author, and swipe down with two fingers to view the threaded conversation. The paned view of content was very cool and surprisingly fast with loading photos and web pages. However, the pinch and two-finger swipe functions are awfully gimmicky: simply tapping on a person’s tweet with a single finger shows profile details and threaded conversations as well, rendering the pinch and double-swipe redundant.
Wired noted that the official Twitter iPad app is "significantly faster and more intuitive" than competing apps for Twitter, such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck.
Silicon Alley Insider said it "has already become our Twitter app of choice on the iPad"; TechCrunch called it "hands-down the best iPad app out there."
Here's Twitter's official blog post on the launch.
