• t.co url shortening support
• Mute filters
• Ability to email single direct messages
• Support for international hashtags
• Bug fixes

Twitter’s Native URL Shortening Service

If you’ve used any of Twitter’s native applications, you may or may not have noticed that URLs are shortened to a t.co domain name. This is Twitter’s URL shortening service. Starting with Tweetbot 1.5, this will be the default shortening service. We’ve also disabled all the other URL shortening services with the exception of bit.ly Pro, CloudApp, and the Custom option.

Why are we doing this? 1) Twitter now automatically shortens all URLs that are at least 19 characters long, even if your link has already been shortened. 2) Twitter’s shortening service shows the real URL in your timeline so you will know which website you’ll be visiting before tapping on it. This is a very good thing. 3) Twitter’s service is faster than a stand alone URL shortener, you’ll be able to post your Tweet’s without waiting for each to link to be shortened. There’s no good reason to use a stand alone URL shortener, other than for tracking purposes.

Mute Filters

This is probably our most requested feature, but I’m sure it will be replaced by something else. :) Mute filters are pretty simple. If you don’t want to see someone’s posts (or hashtag) in your timeline, just hold down on a person’s avatar (or hashtag) and select the “Mute” option. You’ll be able to select a duration of time that you don’t want to see tweets from them or with that hashtag. You can choose from 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or forever. You can manage mute filters in one of the last 2 customizable tab buttons.

Users will have no idea that you have muted them so if you feel bad about unfollowing people, this is a great alternative (although your filters are only used in Tweetbot).

There’s a few caveats to keep in mind. 1) Mute filters only work on your main timeline. They won’t work in lists. 2) If a muted person mentions or DM’s you, you will receive those.

That’s it for now. We are also hard at work on 1.6 and think many of you will be really happy with it as well. :)

• Added sleep time for push notifications (notification quiet hours)
• Option to receive push mentions only from people you follow
• When emailing a link, the subject is the page title if sent from a web view
• Blocking/Reporting for spam now deletes associated tweets from the timeline

State of Push Notifications

For those who still don’t know yet, push notifications have been opened up to everyone. We also want to let you know that push notifications have been running flawlessly on our server so we plan to keep this service free for our users.

Push Hiccups

Tapbots push notification system depends on Twitter’s Site Stream product. Twitter considers this a beta product and while we’ve found it to be very stable there are going to be hiccups along the way. Over the last few days we’ve experienced some issues with the Site Streams server going down and when this happens, push notifications will stop working. When their servers comes back up you may receive a number of notifications as our system tries to catch up on messages it may have missed while the streams were down.

We are also aware that some of you are still not receiving notifications. Make sure you’ve tried everything we’ve posted in our Tweetbot Q & A. If you are getting all notifications except for DM’s, let us know on our @tweetbot account. We are working closely with Twitter to iron out any remaining bugs. We appreciate everyone’s patience on this.

What’s Next

We are hard at work on v1.5 and will be bringing a new feature that has been highly requested. And no, it’s not twitlonger or an iPad version. :)

How do I access push notifications?

The push service works in Tweetbot 1.4.1 or later. To turn them on, go to the Tweetbot Settings (within the app). You should see a section called Account Settings with your account username. That’s where more settings exist specific for each of your accounts. Within that menu is the Push Notifications settings. Flipping one of the switches turns on the push service.

If you get a message saying you can’t access push, that means our beta slots are full and you have to try again later. If you get some sort of APS error message, that means you are still running 1.4 and need to update to 1.4.1.

I turned on push notifications, but I’m not getting anything.

• Make sure the push notification switches are turned on in our app
• Make sure you have notifications enabled for Tweetbot in the iOS system settings
• Try restarting your device

If you are still having issues, It’s probably a network issue of some sort.

Why does the app crash when I get a notification in-app?

You device is probably jailbroken and you are running some system hack/app that is causing tweetbot to crash. One that has been known to cause the crash is Mobile Notifier.

Where are the notification badges?

These are available in 1.4.2 or later. If you don’t see them, make sure you have the latest update. If they still aren’t working, be sure to check your iOS notification settings for Tweetbot. There’s a toggle for badges there.

What about options like muting push during certain times and only pushing mentions from people I follow?

These are also tasks that we will look into later. Remember this is an early beta and we just want to make sure everything is running smoothly before we get into the finer details.

Can I change the notification sound?

No, the sounds we are using are also used within our app. We want to keep sounds consistent so they are instantly recognizable.

Questions about push in iOS 5.

iOS 5 is under NDA and we aren’t allowed to talk about it yet.

So is this service going to cost us money in the future?

Hopefully not, but we don’t have an answer for this right now. Our goal is to provide this service for free to our users, but servers and bandwidth costs money. We will see how things go over the next month or two and have a better idea of how much this service costs us.

The push service isn’t working in 1.4. Provisioning profile issues. Human error. We are truly sorry. We submitted a new build with a fix that will work. We’ve politely asked Apple to expedite the process so hopefully the wait won’t be too long. But don’t feel too upset about this because the service was limited to 1000 people for launch anyways (read why here). Unless you downloaded it as soon as it was available, you probably wouldn’t have gotten access (at least not right away).

The Good News:

The good news is you’ll get another chance to get access when the update is out. :) Lets hope the approval process is quick. Yay?

But in all seriousness, we are truly sorry for the bad news. We know many of you have been waiting for this feature. But it’s still coming and soon enough everyone will be happy. Thanks for your patience and understanding that there’s always issues that come up when humans are involved in building things.

What it Takes to Have Push Notifications

From reading various Tweets and support email there seems to be an impression that enabling push notifications is a simple matter of flipping a switch. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to be able to implement push we need access to Twitter’s Site Streaming API. Twitter considers this API to be “beta” and only allows access to 3rd parties after an approval process. We first asked for access to this API a few months ago and were finally granted access recently. This service is very resource intensive on Twitter’s Servers so we fully understand why they are slowly granting access.

The Twitter Site stream can be thought of as a big tube of data that contains all the posts, mentions, retweets, and etc. for each account in the site stream. Each message that comes in from the site stream has to be parsed, compared to the notifications a Tweetbot user wants to see, reformatted for Apple’s Push Service and then sent back out. And of course to ensure the best user experience this has to happen very very quickly.

Now imagine the above process multiplied by hundreds of thousands of accounts…and well…it gets complicated pretty quickly. Any unintended delay can cause the entire system to backup and a simple bug could cause everyone’s notifications to stop working. We have to put in a lot of effort making sure that we catch as many problems as possible before we launch and quite simply that takes time.

Now that you know what’s involved, lets talk about where we are today.

Tweetbot v1.4

We just submitted Tweetbot v1.4 to Apple today. Here is the official change list:

• Experimental Push Notification Support
• Ability to publish text notes with tweets
• Selected tabs remembered when switching between accounts
• Ability to view someone else’s lists as tweets
• Various bug fixes

So Tweetbot Now has Push Notification Support???

Well…yes and no. Yes, Tweetbot 1.4 has push, but not everyone will have access to it as soon as we launch. We need to make sure our code will properly scale. If we let everyone access the service at once, any small problem on our part may cause the servers to crash. Also, Twitter has only approved us to monitor 10,000 accounts via their site streaming service. Their service is in beta and they need to scale properly as well. We’ll be working with them over the following weeks to increase this limit.

For launch, we are allowing around 1000 twitter accounts to access push notifications. We’ll be carefully monitoring performance and adding more users as fast as we can. To register your device for push, turn on at least one of the switches in the push notification settings. It’s all on a first-come-first-serve basis and if you have access to push and turn them all off, someone else may take your spot. We want to ensure that push works well for everyone and, while it may seem frustrating, we are working as hard as we can to make sure that everyone will eventually have access to push notifications.

If you are on the fence about purchasing Tweetbot, don’t buy it just because of push notifications. We aren’t advertising this as a feature until it’s fully working and accessible to everyone. We would like to continue to offer this service for free, however we can’t promise this until we know more about the long term costs. So for now, please remember this is a new feature, it may not fully work and you may not have access to it right away.

We will announce on Twitter as soon as Apple approves 1.4. Thanks for reading!

Marking Your Timeline or Direct Messages as Read

Tapping on the iOS time status bar at the top is the universal way to scroll to the top of a view. However you can also double-tap on the timeline or mentions tab button to scroll to the top and mark the lists as read. Double-tapping on the direct messages tab will mark all your messages as read.

Favstar in Tweetbot

Favstar is a popular site for tracking twitter favorites. You can view a tweet’s favstar details by going to the tweet detail and hitting the favstar.fm button below the author’s avatar. You can also view a person’s most popular tweets by going to a user’s profile, hitting the action (gear) button, and then on “View in Favstar”. Double-tapping on your profile tab button will show you your most favorited tweets on favstar. Finally, if you subscribe to favstar bonus features, you can award “tweet of the day” by holding down on the fav button.

See who Retweeted Your Tweets

Many customers ask if it’s possible to see who retweeted them. Just go to any tweet’s detail view by double tapping on a tweet or hitting the view detail button (the last button) in the tweet drawer. Tap on the Retweets button under the author’s avatar.

Return Quickly from Being Multiple Levels Deep

If you ever end up multiple levels deep in Tweetbot, hitting the back button 5 times to get back to the main timeline can be annoying. Instead, just hold down on the back button and it will send you right back home.

Location Options

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how locations work in Tweetbot. There are 3 types of location data and you can choose which you prefer most.

By default, turning on locations on a tweet will choose a Twitter Place. Most of the time this is a City. It does not give your exact location away on purpose. Many people like to provide a location stamp without telling everyone exactly where they are. This default option is for you. But there’s one caveat. If you live in a city/country that Twitter’s Places doesn’t support, it will default to the nearest known city. Sometimes this ends up being in another country. This is a result of Twitter’s Places not having data for where you live. If this is an issue, we recommend using coordinates.

Coordinates is another way to share your location. If you tap on the blue location button, you’ll see an option to select coordinates. This is for people who want to share their exact location. You’ll see coordinates when composing your tweet, but Twitter will return and display the city automatically if it can. It will also mark your exact location on the map. If accuracy is important to you, we recommend this option.

Finally, there’s an option to select points of interest. If you tap on the blue location button, you’ll be able to choose from various businesses or landmarks in your area. Keep in mind the results are limited to the POI’s that Twitter is able to provide. This option needs to be selected manually for each tweet.

Retweet from Another Account

Ever see a tweet that you wanted to retweet on one of your other accounts? Just hold down on the retweet button and select the account you want to retweet from.

Post from Another Account

Have you ever started to write a tweet and realize you are composing from the wrong account? Just tap on the title button to quickly switch the account you are composing from.

See What You Are Replying To

If you are replying to a tweet and need to recall something mentioned in that tweet, you can pull down in the compose area to view the tweet you are replying to.

Block and Report as Spam

Spam has become an annoying part of the Twitter experience. In Tweetbot, you can block or block and report as spam via the button at the bottom of a person’s profile. If you are in your timeline, you can just hold down on a person’s avatar and quickly report for spam. You should see a message letting you know the action has been completed successfully.

Keep in mind that since timelines are cached, the tweet won’t disappear when you block or report someone for spam. But you should not see future tweets from that user. If you want to force remove the tweet from your timeline, you can go to Tweetbot’s Settings and then to Account Settings and reset your cache.

Gap Loading

When there are more than 200 tweets that need to be loaded in your timeline, you’ll see a gap with a plus button. This signifies that there are tweets that weren’t loaded there. You can control which way the gap loads depending on the position of the gap on screen when you tap on it. If you like to read tweets from old to new, tap on the gap button when it’s in the top half of the screen to correctly load without losing your place. If you read new to old, tap on the gap button when it’s in the bottom half of the screen.

Services Galore

You’ve probably been to the Tweetbot settings dozens of times, but many miss the “Account Settings” section. This section allows you to customize various services for each twitter account. If you go to the Settings, look for your twitter account name under “Account Settings”. You can set which services you want to use for that particular account.

Mobilizer. Many turn this feature on without knowing what it is. Mobilizer strips images, javascript, and css from web page views so it can load content faster.

Reset Account Cache. This is a handy feature which basically purges all the cached tweets and direct messages in your account. This allows you to pull fresh data from twitter. If you blocked users and don’t want to see their cached tweets in your timeline, this is one way to do it.

Tweetbot 1.2.1

A little over a week ago, you should have gotten the 1.2.1 update. If you haven’t yet, you’d better get it soon. Twitter is changing the way users need to log into their service to make direct messages more secure. This required us (as well as all the other 3rd party clients) to change the login process. Basically we need to send you over to Twitter’s website to login and authenticate our app to access your account. That’s what 1.2.1 is all about. It should be a fairly painless processes, but we are aware that a few of you are having issues logging in. If you are having issues, here are some steps to take:

• Make sure your iOS system time is correct. Twitter won’t allow you to login if your time is incorrect.
• Remove all of your accounts and add them back again.

If you are still having issues, you can email us through our support page.

Tweetbot 1.3

We are submitting Tweetbot 1.3 sometime this week. We don’t know when it will be available, but we will announce on Twitter once it does get approved. Here’s what’s new:

• Improved multiple account switching
• Local trends (can be set in the account settings)
• Improved recipient selector when creating a new direct message
• Ability to copy, delete, and translate direct messages (swipe on a thread to delete a whole group)
• “Add to List” feature improved and renamed to “Manage List Memberships”
• Added “go to user” feature in people search (shows when typing into the “Search People” box)
• Gaps now load above or below depending on position of gap when button is invoked.
• Compose Tweet from hashtag (by holding down on a hashtag in a tweet)
• Drafts button now displays # of drafts.
• Support for Favstar (hold fav button to invoke ‘tweet of the day’, double-tap profile tab to see your own favstar page)
• Various bug fixes

Push Notifications

We know this is a big request and we are still working on getting a solution going. We’ve already explained how complicated and costly it can be to get it running as well as the ability to scale. But one thing we haven’t mentioned is the fact that Twitter needs to approve us for their streaming service. But getting approved is not nearly enough. Their streaming service is currently still in beta and they limit the amount of accounts we can stream so they can properly scale. So the bottom line is there are many components that have to come together for this to happen and we are working on it. It’s not a matter of turning on a switch and having it working for everyone. Complaints and bad reviews because of lack of push won’t make it happen any faster. :)

Tweetbot for iPad and Mac

Even though we answer this all the time, I figured I’d mention it again. At this time, we have no plans for an iPad or Mac version of the app. That’s not to say it won’t ever happen. Twitter is just a shaky platform for 3rd party developers right now and we don’t want to dedicate a lot of time into something that might become a bad business decision. We are going to wait a bit and see how things go.

Twitlonger

Still not going to happen. It’s just not what Twitter is about and we don’t really want it in our app. But the beauty of the app store is if you really want it, there are 50+ Twitter clients that already have that feature. Take your pick! And no, we aren’t trying to be mean here. We are trying to build the best client experience we can for the majority of our users. We can’t and won’t even try to please everyone.

First and foremost, make sure you are running the latest version of Tweetbot.

We are fixing bugs and providing new features in every update so make sure you are up to date. Yes, Captain Obvious speaking here, but it must be said.

We don’t support Jailbroken devices.

System/app hacks can cause issues and we just can’t provide support for them. Sometimes they cause our apps to crash and other times they cause display rendering issues. Customers complain to us thinking our app is the cause of the issue. So all we can say is if you have a jailbroken device and have issues with our app, remove/disable all system/app hacks first and see if that solves your problem.

Not all issues are from Tweetbot.

Tweetbot sends and requests data through Twitter’s API. Some issues are a result of Twitter being down, slow, or because of restrictions/limits in place. When you get a red error message, it’s most likely from Twitter, not Tweetbot.

Known Issues that we are looking into:

• Pull-to-Refresh occasionally breaks

Features that we are thinking about or already have planned:

• “What the Trends” and local trends support
• Ability to mute/filter keywords and users
• More DM options like deleting and copying DMs
• Ability to copy parts of a tweet
• Improved list management

I emailed you/asked you a question on Twitter. Where’s my answer?

Unfortunately, we are getting a high volume of support questions and feedback at this time. We are unable to answer everyone. This page was designed to answer 99% of our support questions. When we come across an issue that multiple users are having and that we can’t replicate, we contact a few users to help us solve the issue.

Why is my location way off?

There are currently 2 ways to use locations in Tweetbot. When you compose a tweet, Tweetbot asks Twitter for a Place and it returns what it thinks the most appropriate place is. Also, to protect your privacy, we limit this location’s accuracy to the city level. This is why by default the map won’t show your exact location. If you want to send your exact location you can tap on the blue location button and select a Point of Interest or use coordinates. Coordinates will send Twitter your exact location. If you are in a country with poor Twitter Places support, we recommend using coordinates as well.

Where is landscape support?

Landscape view works for the compose view, web views, image views, and video.

Where are my push notifications?

Tweetbot currently doesn’t have push notifications. If you must have them, you can use boxcar.io. We are still looking into providing this service, but it can be complicated and costly. We talk more about this here.

Will there be an iPad/Mac version?

It’s a possibility, but we have no plans for it at this time. We are focusing on the iPhone version for now. If we do an iPad version, it will not be universal.

How do I delete a tweet?

You can only delete one of your own tweets by hitting the gear menu button in the tweet drawer. There’s no way to delete a direct message at this time. We will work on that. Tweets deleted in another application may still show up in Tweetbot because they are cached. If you want, you can go into your account settings and clear the cache.

How do I view my profile?

Your profile is one of the customizable tab buttons (last 2 tabs) in your account. Just hold down on one of the tab buttons and select your profile.

How do I block a user or report them for spam?

You can block or report a user by going to their profile and hitting the Block/Report button at the bottom. You can also quickly report someone for spam by holding down on their avatar in the timeline.

Will you guys provide alternative themes in the future?

No. Our app design is part of our company branding.

Will you guys add the option to use the old retweet style?

This is in v1.2. You need to go to the app settings and change your quote format. Then when you go to retweet, choose “Quote Tweet” instead of “Retweet to Followers”.

What about Twitlonger/Twitmore?

The answer at this time is no. We believe that part of the Twitter experience is carefully crafting what you want to say in 140 characters. If you want to write something longer, you should get a blog. We will revisit this and think about it at a later time.

Will you guys have textexpander support?

No plans for it at this time. We are always wary of 3rd party code running in our applications.

I can view people in my lists, but how do I view tweets from my lists?

Go to your main timeline. Tap on the “Timeline” title in the navbar. From here you can use any of your lists as your timeline.

Why don’t some of my followers show up in the @user picker when composing a tweet?

Right now we are pulling from cached users who have tweets in your current timeline. This is how most twitter clients work right now except for Twitter for iPhone. It’s a technical limitation.

Where is Droplr Support?

We will have Droplr support once they finalize their new API.

Can I copy a part of a tweet?

Not at this time. We will solve this issue at some point. You can copy the whole tweet by tapping on the gear button in the tweet drawer.

Why does Tweetbot take longer to get tweets?

Some clients are using the streaming service to get tweets faster. The streaming service is not recommended for mobile clients because the connection has to open and close often. So it’s not an issue with Tweetbot, but the Twitter API that’s not providing the update fast enough on occasion.

Valid as of version 1.0.2

• tweetbot://<screenname>/timeline
• tweetbot://<screenname>/mentions
• tweetbot://<screenname>/retweets
• tweetbot://<screenname>/direct_messages
• tweetbot://<screenname>/lists
• tweetbot://<screenname>/favorites
• tweetbot://<screenname>/search
• tweetbot://<screenname>/search?query=<text>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/status/<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/user_profile/<profile_screenname>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/post
• tweetbot://<screenname>/post?text=<text>

The <screename> argument is optional. You may include it to go to a specific account or leave it blank and either the current or default user account will be chosen instead. As usual all query <text> should be URL encoded and other then that everything should be pretty obvious.

Valid as of version 1.3

• tweetbot://<screenname>/post?text=<text>&callback_url=<url>&in_reply_to_status_id=<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/search?query=<text>&callback_url=<url>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/status/<tweet_id>?callback_url=<url>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/user_profile/<screenname|user_id>?callback_url=<url>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/follow/<screenname|user_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/unfollow/<screenname|user_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/favorite/<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/unfavorite/<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/retweet/<tweet_id>

The argument callback_url is an URL encoded URL that will be opened in Safari once the Post view closes.

Valid as of version 1.4

• tweetbot://<screenname>/list/<list_id>?callback_url=<url>

Any questions stick them below and I’ll update the docs as needed.

Version 1.0.2

This is going to be a bug fix release. We’ve been working on this for a couple weeks now and it should be ready to ship off to Apple sometime this week. There’s over 2 dozen tweaks and fixes in this release, some of the major ones are listed below.

• Greatly improved performance when switching accounts.
• Profile view cleaned up to make it more obvious how to see a user’s timeline as well as including tweet count.
• Fixed performance slow down when app is running for a long time.
• Made it much more obvious that we have support for Read it Later and Instapaper.
• Added “Tiny” font size.
• Readability support.
• Posterous support.

Version 1.1

The main focus in this release is going to be Landscape mode. One of the thing that makes our apps special is that our entire UI is custom. This means our apps look like nothing else, it also means that we can’t just add a couple lines of code and get landscape support. We have to redesign a number of elements in our UI so that they work properly in landscape mode. This takes time and it’s the reason it didn’t make it into the 1.0 release. Once this is done we’re going to support landscape mode on the Post, Media and Web screens.

Native Push Notifications

This is a tricky issue. There’s the technical complexity of having to deal with hundreds of thousands of clients and two totally different services (Twitter’s and Apple’s) but that’s just a matter of time and elbow grease. The thing we worry about with this feature is the costs. We’re not a huge company like Twitter that has a server infrastructure already in place. We’re also not a backed by VCs and can’t afford to lose money and make up for it in “volume”. Servers cost money and bandwidth costs money. There are 3rd party services that help dealing with push notifications but they all charge either by messages or by the user. In other words push, specially in high volumes, isn’t free. I would hope even the people complaining about paying the $2 sales price wouldn’t want to see us lose money on each sale of Tweetbot.

All that being said we do plan to figure out what to do with native push notifications. Hopefully we can get the price per user down enough that it can just be a free feature for everyone. If not we may have to resort to a nominal yearly subscription fee for the service. We’re not looking to make money on push notifications but we also don’t want to lose our shirts on it either. In the meantime, Boxcar is a pretty decent alternative.

A Little Bit of Patience

I’m going to be blunt here–we’re slow. There’s only two of us and everything we do is very purposeful and requires a lot of testing to make sure things work right the first time. Add in all the custom UI, pixel-pushing, localization, beta testing and week long Apple review times and even small changes can seem like they take forever. Please be patient. We do hear your requests and will get to many of them.

Thanks for All the Support

So far Tweetbot has been our most successful bot launch by quite a large margin. It’s really gratifying to see all the hard work pay off with thousands of satisfied users. We’ve been inundated with notes of congratulations and features request. We can’t reply to all of them but we do read them all. Thank you.