When iPhone 2.0 launched, Twitterific was the Twitter app. Beautiful, clean, simple. Then Twitter apps exploded, and several months later, it suddenly seemed a little too simple. Twitterific 2 plays feature catch-up.
The original Twitterific was designed around reading—so that's what it was (and still is) good at. Twitterific 2 takes that core and layers stuff on top of it. In order to keep things looking clean, it hides everything behind buttons, so it feels like there's a lot of drilling down every time you want to do something, which ironically makes the otherwise exceptionally eye-pleasing app feel cluttered and busy.
But feature parity is finally here: You can now do basically anything you can with Tweetie or other full-featured apps, like actually follow and unfollow people, split the timeline up between your regular one and replies, drill down into threads, search—though it's stuck in an odd place—check trends, see people nearby, etc. Two awesome, unique features: Marking tweets is like favorites, except it's private, it has a compressor that shortens both URLs and text, which squeezing the most you can out of 140 characters.
It's still the best reading experience of any Twitter app, strictly from an eyeball point of view, but I wish it managed to add all of the new features without losing some of the focused, streamlined feel of the original. The free version is a decent alternative to Twitterfon, but if you're debating between spending $3 on Tweetie or $4 on the paid version of Twitterific, Tweetie wins. [Twitterific]