QuickAdvice: View Twitter Photos In A New Way With Scopy
Scopy ($0.99) by Ignition Soft Limited is a photos-only Twitter client that extracts all photos in your timeline and presents them in a beautiful way.
Twitter is a great place for us to share our photos with each other, but doesn't that timeline get a bit cluttered up with it's only text and links to photos? Well, Scopy has come in and aims to solve that problem.
When you get past the beautifully designed splash screen for Scopy, you enter your Twitter credentials in and wait for your timeline to load. This timeline will be much different than what you've been accustomed to in the past - this is a timeline of photos.
Scopy will load up the latest tweets from your friends but only the ones that have a photo in them. The supported services include: Camera+, Flickr, img.ly, Imgur, Instagram, Picplz, Plixi, Steply, Twitpic, YFrog, Embedly, Posterous, Screencast.com, Skitch, deviantART, and more.
As you can see, the supported services are pretty vast and no matter what you or your friends use, you should be able to view any photo regardless of where it is hosted on.
So as you scroll through the timeline, you can view large thumbnail images of the photos that your friends have uploaded. If there was any text in that tweet to describe the photo, it will show up underneath, as well as any geolocation data. If it was a retweet, it will show who retweeted it.
The design of the app puts the text in what appears to be a folded piece of paper, and a mini-map taped beneath it. It's the small things, but it looks incredibly nice.
Tapping on a photo will go into a full-screen viewer that also gives you a couple of options. You can Save, Mail, or Open URL for the specific image or view geolocation data. Additionally, you can navigate through the timeline images with the arrow buttons, or view all the photos from a selected user.
Going back to the timeline, above the photo is the user and a timestamp of when the photo was uploaded. To the right of it are two buttons: Reply and Like.
Reply allows you to send an @ mention to the user with a comment about the photo. The Like button actually favorites the tweet. Though there isn't a way to view these favorites from the app, you can access them from the Twitter web interface or any other Twitter app with Favorites access.
There's a button in the top corner to refresh, or you can just do it the awesome way and pull the screen down to refresh. If I were the developers, I'd just get rid of that refresh button. Ever since the original Tweetie introduced the Pull-to-Refresh, it's become the norm in many apps, including Facebook. I'm pretty sure that even the average iPhone user knows of it by now...
While viewing photos in your timeline is nice, it wouldn't be any fun if you couldn't upload your own! Scopy lets you do that too. Tap that camera button and you're taken to a new tweet screen.
The Add Photo frame allows you to take a new photo or pull one from your Camera Roll. There are seven filters that you can add to your photo, the same way you can in Instagram. When you got your photo, hit Next and it will be processed and get uploaded, and you can add a description to go along with it. If geolocation is your thing, you can add that information in your tweet if it's enabled on your Twitter account. When it's sent, it will show up with the rest of the photos in your timeline.
Aside from the main photo timeline, you can view people's photos individually. The People tab allows you to select from any of your Friends or Followers and view their individual, photo-only, tweets. There is a Search tab, where you can view the current Trending Topics or even search for photos tagged with a keyword of your choice.
The Settings allow you to choose how many tweets to go through and extract photos, from the choices of 50, 100, or 200. This will affect the download and processing time.
For your own uploads, you can choose from six photo uploading services: Plixi, YFrog, Twitgoo, Posterous, Twitpic, and Steply. There are options to have small, medium, or large uploads (affects uploading time, of course), and the option to save the original photos prior to any applied filters.
All-in-all, Scopy provides a great new way to just view the world as seen through your Twitter friends. Perhaps in updates they can include more uploading services, more filters for photos, and a way to view your Liked photos from within the app. There also isn't any support for the front facing camera on the iPhone 4 currently, so I hope the developer addresses that in the future.
For a 1.0 app though, Scopy is very polished and well thought out. If you want a good way to view the photos of your Twitter timeline at a glance, then check out Scopy. It's a bargain at the $1 release price.
