Chirpie

Posted on March 1st, 2010. Written by Jane.

The first thing that stood out for me after I had searched for Chirpie in the app store was the great icon, a cute little blue bird peeping out of a cracked egg. I love nothing more than a application with a great eye-catching icon, but maybe that’s just my girlie side showing!

There are many twitter clients out there for the iPhone and if I am honest it takes a lot to impress me because I have tried many of them! Chirpie is an app with a difference. It enables you to update your twitter and facebook status, quickly and with no hassle of having to load and read all your timeline as well. Great for when you’re on the go or wanting to send a sneaky tweet at work. Yes, we all do it!

When you first start Chirpie you are asked for your account details, it is at this point you can also activate your facebook account to receive the updates as well. This all took less than a minute and I was ready to go. The first screen you come to is your typing area at the top with your keyboard at the bottom and you can simply just type away your tweet! As you do there is a little scrolling line in the middle counting down the characters for you. So you don’t go past your 140 limit.

If you want to add a link and shrink the url then you press the settings button in the middle and it will bring up 3 more options for you. One of them is ‘shrink urls’ and you just press that and Chirpie does the rest for you. The button next to it is ‘photo’ which enables you to take a photo or get a photo straight from your photo library. Again you just press that button and follow the options. It really is that easy! The last option is to geo-tag your tweets. To change any of these settings, for example to choose which image service you would like to use for your photo uploads you can do that in your normal phone settings. The image services available at the moment are Yfrog and Twitpic.

Now the little hidden gem here for me is the thin scrolling row of profile pictures of your recently tweeted friends. If you press the one that you want to @ reply their user name appears in the typing area! This I thought was an excellent idea and something that puts it slightly above the other twitter apps of its kind.

Once you have typed all of your tweet you just hit the send key, a message will appear to say the tweet is sent, the typing area clears and you are ready to type another tweet about what ever is bothering you in the world!

All in all this is a great twitter client and one that i will most definitely use on a regular basis. It is so easy to use and with a great clear layout. There is still room for improvement, the need for landscape mode I am sure will be asked for and more options for image services is maybe something else the developer could look at.

Chirpie is free to use with one Twitter account and one Facebook account. If you would like to use it with multiple accounts then you will need Chirpie Pro which is 59p. A price in my opinion that is well worth paying for a great twitter application.