I've been spending more and more time on App.net recently, for a few reasons:
- I like the slower-moving pace of my feed over there. If I don't check on it for a day or two, I can still catch up pretty easily.
- The quality of conversation is typically higher than what you'll find on Twitter. I think this is in part because...
- ...It allows you to write 256 characters per post rather than only 140.
The thing is, none of the 3rd-party ADN clients have looked all that great to me. I've been using Netbot since I'm familiar with the interface, being a Tweetbot user and all, but it gets old switching between two apps that look almost exactly the same.
Well, now there's a new client known cleverly as Riposte (pronounced like "repost") that people have been clamoring over for the past week or so. I decided to drop the $5 and check it out, and I'm glad I did.
The shortest way I can summarize Riposte would be to call it the Twitterrific 5 of App.net. That wouldn't quite be doing it justice though, so I want to talk about some of its specific features I really enjoy.
For one thing, it has a full-screen mode just like Twitterrific 5. This comes in handy since many people take advantage of the ability to write longer posts on ADN. With no bottom toolbar to get in the way, scrolling is much less of a pain.
This is a heavily gesture-driven app. Rather than wasting space with a 'Back' button, you simply swipe left-to-right to go back. Swipe up/down with two fingers to enable/disable dark mode, much like a night switch. Swipe right-to-left on a post in your timeline to view details and conversations.
The best gestures are used when editing text, though: swipe left or right with one finger to move the cursor one character at a time, swipe with two fingers to move by words, and swipe with three fingers to jump to the beginning or end of a line. These gestures are so useful, I wish Apple would implement them throughout all of iOS.
Another great feature is the ability to enable or disable "Hop-Ons," meaning that you can either show or hide replies from users in conversations when they don't @mention the main participants of the discussion. Anyone who uses ADN knows how long conversations can get as more people jump in, so this feature is a godsend.
Speaking of conversations, there's a neat feature that allows you to email a nicely-formatted copy of a given conversation to someone else.
There are lots of other little things I like, such as the overall speed of the app (even on cellular, everything feels very snappy) and the nice look of profile pages, but I'll leave it to you guys to find all the goodies yourselves.
I can say that there aren't too many negatives to speak of. I'll list the ones I've noticed thus far:
- In-app search only looks for usernames and profiles. You can't just look for posts that contain specific terms.
- No Droplr support even though it supports CloudApp.
- No landscape keyboard.
- Usernames don't auto-complete when composing a post; you have to tap the '@' icon first and then search for the name that way.
- The option to upload a photo doesn't include a 'Use Last Photo' choice, which would be nice.
And that's pretty much it. If you're looking for a new ADN client, this is the one I'd recommend at the moment.
