My Week With DestroyTwitter 2

Over the past 7 days I have been using DestroyTwitter 2 as my main gateway to the Twitter world. Overall, it has been a great experience, but for me – a hardcore user of twitter.com – it took some time to get used to the layout but after two days or so I really got into it.

I feel that the best way to state my thoughts on this client is to list all the pros and cons:

Pros:
- Insanely impressive levels of customization: a plethora of themes and settings.
- As a typography enthusiast, I really like the font that is used.
- Once you get used to the interface it is very intuitive and natural.
- Good notification system, customisable sounds and can location on the screen (top or bottom).
- Smooth and consistent animations between each column.

Cons:
- No easy way of viewing your own profile (or other people’s profiles) and statistics.
- If you get an @mention, there is no way of seeing what tweet they are replying to.
- Quite easy to lose track of what's going on if you follow a lot of people.
- Links always look the same, you cannot tell if it's a video, or picture, or article.
- No direct way of viewing a picture inside the client, it opens up your web browser.

My overall thoughts:

All in all, DestroyTwitter 2 has genuinely impressed me, but there are still lots of things that the developers could do to improve it. The first thing I do with almost any application that I download is have a look around the preferences and get everything set up just as I like it. When I found the preferences pain in DestroyTwitter I was presented with a whole load of options including on the behaviour and appearance of the application. Due to the easy to use, categorised layout of these options it took me about five minutes to go through everything and get the client set up as I like, so DestroyTwitter 2 scores points for being user friendly – whether it be a person like myself, who has had little or no experience of Twitter clients before or someone who has been using another client for years.

When it came to using the application as a part of my everyday life, it integrated very well. The majority of the time I had it set up as a single column on the right hand side of my display and I found myself naturally going across to use it whenever I wanted to tweet.

However, I still frequently found myself wanting to go onto twitter.com to view peoples profiles and view the statistics on my own profile, as there is no easy way of doing that directly inside the client itself. It also took me a while to get used to the thin layout and, although I don’t follow many people, I found it quite easy to lose track of what was going on.

All in all this client is good. A nice starting point for people new to Twitter client users, offering customization that allows everyone to like what they see as well as not making the user experience unintuitive and confusing.

I would rate the client at 7/10.

Be sure to check back next Sunday for my review on MetroTwit!

In the mean-time, feel free to follow me on Twitter to see how I’m getting on!