Ever feel a need to take Twitter with a grain of salt? Simple and elegant, Trickle displays your tweets and automatically updates at set intervals. The main screen allows you to retweet and favorite the currently shown tweet, that’s it, that’s all. Trickle is the perfect minimal Twitter application.
Caleb Thorson, the developer of the application, states that ‘Trickle is designed to do one thing—display tweets.” Although it won’t replace your main Twitter client because of it’s lack of posting options, it’s a perfect sidekick for your docking station. It displays your timeline in beautiful Helvetica (because who doesn’t like Helvetica?) on a black background. It’s outright gorgeous.
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What’s Macgasmic:
Trickle supports several accounts and puts them into a merged timeline, which is great for people who despise switching between accounts on other clients. The application lets you set update intervals and automatically slides to new tweets when they are available. The main timeline includes a favorite and retweet button, along with a settings button that fades away when not needed. Clicking the settings will allow you to set the refresh intervals and interface options.
What Needs Work:
Sometimes I had a little trouble having it update at the set times, and I frequently have to flick through several old tweets to get to the most recent tweets. The application frequently force-quits when I dock my iPod, and the timeline usually stops refreshing if you receive a push notification, which led me to turn push notifications off.
What I’d Like to See:
Believe it or not, some people like Comic Sans. In-app purchases of different fonts would be excellent, and would bring more revenue to the application. You could go to the font list in the settings, and view available fonts. Fonts such as Comic Sans and Garamond would certainly be popular.
Another idea is that transition options would be available in the settings. Instead of scrolling, new tweets could fade in, slide in from above, etc.
Conclusion:
Despite minor frustrations, Trickle is a great application to display anywhere. Even if you don’t have a dock, it looks great propped up against everyday objects such as a water bottle. Version 1.1 brought the ‘pull to refresh’ action found in many popular Twitter clients and clickable links that will open in Safari. Hopefully the next update will bring more customizability to the app. Trickle is currently on sale for ‘cheap as chips’ at $0.99 USD, and featured in Apple’s ‘New and Noteworthy’ section. It’s worth looking at.
