Birdbrain is an app that I was given the opportunity to review over the past few days. The app is not new by any stretch; however, it seems that many people don’t know of its features, how well it does tasks or what it does exactly, and that’s what us sexy people at Macgasm are here for.
Table of Contents
What it Does
Birdbrain is a fairly simple app, yet there are none like it really. At least, none that put the entire package into one app and display it all into a simple yet well designed way. The amazing thing about this app is that it’s not a one feature app, nor is it a simple “show who has unfollowed you” type app. It’s a full on Twitter statistics app and that’s what sets it apart from others.
Style
The app looks amazing on my phone, (albeit with a custom font) and the amount of time that went into perfecting small things is nearly astounding. There’s design, then there’s perfecting your own design and that’s what Birdbrain aimed to do — and succeeded.
Here you can see a quick summary of how many people I’m following, how many are following me, updates, mentions I’ve received, retweeted, and finally, how many people I have blocked (eep!). The style of it is amazingly elegant and simple. There’s nothing popping out at me telling me to go one place, nothing seems out of the ordinary and follows the average human interface guidelines (HIG) of Apple apps while still adding that flare of personal design.
Functions
The app doesn’t stop at simply an overview of your stats. It shows you each of the stats in depth. For example, the followers tab gives you list of all the people who have either started following you, or have stopped following you, which is nice. It’s always nice to know if someone hates you enough to unfollow you on a social network, or if they like you just enough to read your tweets.
You get a nice list with little glyphs showing who has started and who has decided to stop following you, complete with their followers’ counts and names. Clicking an inactive name will give you a pop up saying, “User has been suspended,” which makes sense since an account that never existed to start with can’t unfollow you.
Then, there’s the beloved Mentions tab. Some people may find this useless if they have a Twitter application that shows this information already. You can go to a certain date and find a tweet, if need be. You don’t remember what your friend Tommy said to you on Easter? Go to the date, find Tommy’s avatar, and there you go. There’s the tweet.
Lastly, you have the More column. This column lists all of the current tabs but has a few extras packed in, too. You have your Lists, Go to User, and my favorite, My favstar.fm. Same as the others, you can tap one of them and be presented with a list of who has you in a list, who removed you from a list, and what lists have been deleted. Next, you have the Go to User, which does the obvious — goes to a certain user and gives you a brief rundown on if they follow you or not and their latest tweet along with some other information. Then there’s Favstar. Those of us who try to be somewhat funny on twitter already know about this service. It logs all the faves you’ve received from other people and shows you how many faves your tweet received and also, how many retweets. It’s a simple webview of the site, so don’t expect to see the same design carried through.
What’s Macgasmic?
The app looks beautiful, does its job perfectly, and manages to make it all look elegant and simple. It’s an app that has one objective: to show you your Twitter statistics, and it achieves this with style. It doesn’t pull any fast moves to make you follow someone, doesn’t ask for anything — it’s a great app with no agenda.
What’s Not?
The app only has one fault. It only logs data from the day you start using it. Everything previous to that is lumped in one date. Besides that, there’s not much I can say bothers me about this app or does anything less than impress me. I’m impressed with this app simply because it says it does something — and does it. It’s sad that it has come to this point with app utilities but it’s also refreshing that some developers put consumers first.
Final Thought
Birdbrain is a lovely app — there’s no denying it. There’s nothing I would change, nothing I would try to fix, or anything I can fault the developer for. The developer isn’t able to log information predating the time you’ve used it because the app has no access to those things. The app is small, nice, simple, elegant, and overall amazing. I’m constantly stunned with how well it does these things and how easy it is for me to navigate from within the app.
If you’re interested in Birdbrain and want to check it out, you can get it on the AppStore for $2.99
