Android App Spotlight: Talon For Twitter

Since Twitter started taking a more aggressive stance towards 3rd party Twitter clients, chatter and excitement over 3rd party apps has died down. It’s increasingly rare to find both a new Twitter app as well as one that’s well polished and full of features at launch. And withTwitter is unlikely to give their blessing ever again, holding out hope for a return to the glory days of 3rd party Twitter clients is nothing but a pipe dream. But while getting a new Twitter client up and running, despite the difficulties, is still possible, getting push notification is all but impossible. And for power users (read: the people really looking for new and useful 3rd party apps), this is a problem. Based on all of this, that’s why it’s so surprising to see something like Talon for Twitter by Luke Klinker launch today.

What you’ll immediately notice about Talon for Twitter is that it features a nicely designed, fluid UI. The timeline lag that causes me immense, emotional grief on most Twitter clients isn’t present in Talon. Also, there’s a decent amount of theming support via three built-in themes and the ability to create (and share) your own.

As far as features go there are a ton, including: Live streaming, multi-account (2) support, the customizable theme engine, night mode, full-app popup feature, in-line viewing of various services/content, ability to hide various UI elements, a DashClock extension and plenty more. The most intriguing perhaps is “Talon Pull”. Since getting official push notification support from Twitter is about as positive as a snowball’s chance in hell, we’re interested to see how well Talon’s solution works both in speed/timeliness as well as how it affects battery life. There’s more info about the Talon Pull feature in the “Get Help” section within settings which links back to a couple posts on Luke’s Google+ page where he goes into pretty good depth about what it is, how it works and why he chose to go this route. The short version: It shouldn’t affect battery life more than your typical Twitter app polling on 30 minute to 1-2 hour schedule. That of course will vary depending on device, network and how active you are on Twitter.

For a 1.0 release, the app is chock full of major features with a healthy amount of small touches here and there, a nice and refreshing UI and most importantly, relatively stable. Speaking of which, I have noticed a couple issues so far. One problem occurred when trying to add a second account. Talon reloaded my main account then locked up and required force stopping it to get my phone back on track. The second issue occurs when using the tap + hold gesture on a tweet in the main timeline. When you tap + hold the keyboard pops up but when you actually start typing, the text field that pops up inline disappears and it appears that the actual action of replying quits as the timeline starts jumping all over the place if I continue to type on the keyboard which is still visible.

$1.99 for what is already up at the top of my list of favorite Twitter apps is more than worth it. Yes, there are a few bugs to be had here and there. But again, for a 1.0 release Talon is pretty solid, nice to look at and full of features. What more could you ask for? Whether you’re the type that likes to try new things or not, Talon is definitely something you should check out.

Download Talon for Twitter: Talon for Twitter (Play Link)
Breakdown of Talon Pull: Luke Klinker (Google +)
Google+ Community Page: Twitter for Talon on Google+

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