Tweet your Tunes with airTweet 2

With Twitter being the go-to social network for sharing small blurbs about current on-goings, there’s undoubtedly many who love to post what music there listening to. It’s a quick and easy way to share your musical tastes, and allow friends to check out the tunes as well. However, there is very little out there that makes writing these tweets quicker and more efficient. You need to manually type out all the info, and hunt down an iTunes link to allow others a sample listen. airTweet2 is an iPhone application by Marcel Müller, that aims to bridge the gap between beautiful music playback and easy social sharing.

Before we get into airTweet’s social features let’s take a look at some of the features that makes it so beautiful for general music playback. The first big one is its gesture based interactivity. Instead of visible playback controls, airTweet uses simple gestures to control your tunes. For instance, double tapping on the album artwork triggers the play/pause function. Swipe right to go to the next track, left to the previous one, and drag up and down to control the volume. A full list of gesture controls exist for your viewing pleasure, in the in-app help page. The gestures themselves feel natural, and work well and I personally choose to use airTweet2 over the default music app simply because of the great playback interactions, let alone the social sharing features.

airTweet Album ViewThe interface itself is pretty sleek, featuring a nice dark UI, that’s easy on the eyes during late hours. The bottom tab bar features tabs for the currently playing song, album view (you can toggle between list and grid view by tapping the tab bar item), tweet composition, all song titles, and a ‘More’ tab. This tab offers a list of extras, which can replace the 2nd and 4th tab action via drag and drop. I personally feel the tab bar could have done without the “Tweet” tab, owing to the fact that the new tweet button in the top right is always accessible to you. The customizable tab is a nice touch, but it wasn’t immediately apparent to me that it could be customized through the ‘More’ tab.

airTweet Compose ViewClearly the flagship feature of airTweet 2, is its ability to quickly and easily post what you’re listening to, on to Twitter. Whenever you want to tweet, there is a globally accessible button in the top right that takes you to the tweet composition screen. This screen is where you’ll build your tweet depending on what meta data you want in it, in which order. There are sub tabs which allow you to quickly insert all kinds info, such as track info, twitter usernames, hashtags and images, iTunes and GrooveShark links, locations, etc. The farthest right allows you to quickly drop in a full tweet using a configurable template that can be accessed in the app’s settings. It’s quick and easy to use, but doesn’t compromise flexibility, to ensure you can tweet exactly the info you want.

Due to its powerful gesture-based controls, and flexible tweeting capabilities, airTweet 2 has completely replaced the default music app on the iPhone, for me. The interface is pleasing, and while some functionality is a little nebulous, it’s overall a pleasure to use on a daily basis. You can grab a copy of airTweet 2 for just $1.99 on the App Store.

About Collin Henderson

Collin is a 22 year old designer, developer, composer, student, and breakfast connoisseur from Ontario, Canada.
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