I played a bit with the Twitter for iPad app (announced recently on the Twitter blog), and found it a pleasant experience for casual use, but not particularly well-suited for more intensive use that involves multi-tasking. The slide-over pane organization is elegant and more usable than TweetDeck for iPad’s browser. It works particularly well for reading web pages in portrait mode: pages can be zoomed to hide the ads and show just the main column in a reasonably-sized font.

Ironically, the multiple overlapping panes that are so appealing in this design echo windows of desktop user interfaces, something that most apps have avoided to date.

The tool also includes a search interface, but I could not find a way to save searches persistently. One of the main uses of search for me is to follow conference-related tweets, and it’s nice to keep those around for longer than Twitter’s ever-shrinking search window permits. With the current limit of something like 4 or 5 days, early tweets from a major conference will not be accessible by the conference’s end. Thus it’s useful to have clients (such as TweetDeck) that can cache search results and supplement them with new tweets.

In short, it’s nice to see the iPad application user interface evolve to incorporate new styles of information presentation; I hope these kinds of interactions will make it into other applications. On the other hand, I am not giving up on other Twitter apps yet.

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