QuickAdvice: Kick Back And Watch Your Twitter Timeline "Trickle" By
Trickle for Twitter ($0.99) by Caleb Thorson is a passive Twitter client that works best in the background on your desk or nightstand as you let tweets 'trickle' in.
Most of us probably think of feature-rich Twitter clients when we shop around in the App Store for one, right? These require our full attention and we can't just launch it and put it up as a display on our desks, nightstands, and whatnot.
Trickle is different. This isn't your average Twitter client - it serves as a passive client that you launch and 'let it do it's thing.'
Upon launch, you'll need to log in to your Twitter account. Once you log in, you'll get a plain screen with a tweet in large Helvetica text. You also see who sent it and how long ago.
Like all Twitter clients, there are options to Retweet and Favorite. To favorite or retweet, you'll have to hold the button down until it becomes colored - this is the sign that it went through (and you should see a spinner at the top status bar). Unfortunately, since this is a passive client, you can't reply or send new tweets from Trickle, but that wasn't the point of the client to begin with.
As new tweets come in, they will come in from the right side of the screen. All you have to do is prop your device up with a dock or upright on a desk and watch tweets go by. It makes a great desk decoration!
There are some settings that allow you to control the app more. They can be accessed via the "i" button in the bottom left corner. You can have multiple accounts in the app, but you will have to select one to view at a time. If you want to see tweets on a topic, you can do a search and have only those tweets show up one-at-a-time in Trickle. These searches are saved and can be accessed anytime.
More Settings include a Rotation toggle, when the buttons should be displayed, the button style (text or icons), and how often the app should refresh your timeline (from 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 30, and 60 minutes).
Trickle is a Universal app and looks great on both the iPhone and iPad.
Currently, there is no way to click links in tweets, but the developer has told me that this will be fixed in the next update. I also hope that they add a way to filter your main timeline (Trending Topics, hashtags, event tweets, etc) in an update. Other than that, there have been no issues with the app in its current state.
If you're looking for a new way to experience your Twitter timeline or have a nifty Twitter decoration on your desk while you work, then Trickle should do the trick. Just kick back and relax as your timeline "trickles" it's way to you.
