Tweetary Turns Your Twitter Into Your Own Private Diary

tweetary: Your Personal Twitter Diary ($4.99) by tappnology is a combination of your favorite social network and a private diary where you can keep your thoughts to yourself.

When you launch Tweetary, the app will automatically load up any Twitter accounts that you have linked to iOS. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to add an account manually, so if you haven’t already linked Twitter to iOS, you’ll have to do that first. There also isn’t an option to only import one “tweetary” if you have multiple accounts — it’s all or nothing, though you can delete individual tweetaries if you don’t want them. Each notebook can also be password protected, and there are more options like iCloud syncing, read later services, and more when you tap on the gear button on a diary.

Once you find the account that you want to open, just tap on it. Tweetary features a very skeuomorphic interface that represents a notebook with pages tied together and bookmarks to show date. While I’m not the biggest fan of skeuomorphism, this is actually a nice touch, as it helps to make it stand out against other Twitter apps. The Diary side is on the left of the notebook, while the regular Twitter client part is on the right side. To navigate between them, just tap on the arrow buttons on the bottom corner of the screen. If you ever need to go back to the main menu where the books are displayed, just tap on the current account’s profile picture in the top left corner.

The Diary stream will show you all of the tweets that you have made, as well as anything you have retweeted. You can filter entries or even search. There is a “Quick Nav”option as well, but it doesn’t appear to do much when I tap on it.

Once you “read” an item (I use the term lightly, because reading means just scrolling past the item), the “New” sticker goes away. You can tap on a tweet of yours to display more details about it, and you get several options: annotation, bookmarking, and the “Share” menu, where you can delete, copy, mail, or post to Twitter.

Annotating a tweet allows you to add some of your own thoughts to it, add media, and even tags. These are not published to Twitter, as they will remain in the Diary part of Tweetary. You can also add a new diary entry as well by tapping on the “New” button in the top right corner, where you can also attach photos and tags. None of these will show up on Twitter unless you specifically push it to be public.

Along the top of the screen, you can navigate between the Diary, Bookmarks, Watchlist, Metrics, and Gallery. Bookmarks will only show tweets you have bookmarked or favorited on Twitter, and the Watchlist allows you to save tweets that match certain criteria. Any media that you attach to posts in Tweetary will find themselves in the Gallery.

Metrics is pretty neat, because it can gather information about a user, such as top mentions, and present the data in an infographic. If you have ever wanted to know about stuff like that, then you can find it in Tweetary.

If you are more interested in using Tweetary like a normal Twitter app, you can do that as well. The other side of the notebook allows you to navigate between your Timeline, Mentions, Messages, Search, and Your Profile via the drop down menu at the top. There’s no live streaming, but the app fetches new tweets in regular intervals. You can also refresh manually with pull-to-refresh.

When you have something to say, tap on the tweet to bring up the various actions: saving to diary, reply, retweet, favoriting, view conversation, bookmark in diary, copy and mail tweet. It may not have all of the power-user features as Tweetbot, or look as pretty as Twitterrific, but it’s nice to be able to combine a diary with your Twitter life, right?

I only checked out the app on my iPhone so far, but the iPad interface looks much nicer, since it utilizes the large screen estate of the tablet. Rather than have drop down menus at the top, the iPad displays the various sections as tabs along the side of the notebook. Everything else is easier to navigate as well.

While the concept is nice, I did encounter some problems with the app. My biggest annoyance was that the app likes to be randomly unresponsive. Even though I’m pretty sure I tapped something like I am supposed to, the app does not do anything. Sometimes, it looks like it recognized my tap to move to a different section of the app, but it did not do anything. I would need to force quit the app and go back into it.

I also chose to delete an account from it, but my choice is not “sticking” with the app, and it keeps coming back on every launch. This can be a bit irritating, so I hope that the developers can fix that in a future update.

For those who have ever wanted to combine a personal diary with their Twitter client, then Tweetary is worth checking out. However, if that has never crossed your mind, nor do you really need that, then I would suggest sticking with a dedicated Twitter app.

Tweetary is on sale for $4.99 in the App Store for your iPhone and iPad. It’s currently on sale for 20 percent off, so if you want something like this, make sure to grab it now!