There is absolutely no short­age of Twit­ter apps avail­able for the iPhone. But in my mind (and the minds of many oth­ers) one stands above all the rest: Tweetie. And while the app has under­gone sev­eral small tweaks since it was first released last year, a big time revamp is about to hit: Tweetie 2. […]

We’ve been test­ing out of the app for a few weeks now, and I’m happy to report that it’s the Tweetie you know and love, but better.

Maybe you’ve seen some tweets from users in recent weeks labeled as com­ing from “Big­bird”? Yeah, that’s Tweetie 2.0. Some may recall that this was also the code name for Tweetie for the Mac right before it launched. The rea­son for the nick­name is that Tweetie 2 is built on top of the Project Big­bird core, which Atebits devel­oper Loren Brichter first devel­oped for Tweetie for Mac. This means an iPhone Tweetie that is “faster, slim­mer, and much more pow­er­ful,” as Brichter puts it.

So what’s new? A lot. Here are the big ones.

Per­sis­tence — Tweetie now remem­bers the last thing you were brows­ing when you closed the app. This means if you were on a user’s Twit­ter pro­file, you will go back there when you open the app again.

New mes­sage indi­ca­tors — When you have a new @reply or direct mes­sage, you will now see a glow­ing blue light below those sec­tions to let you know.

Scroll up to reload — Rather than hav­ing a sep­a­rate reload but­ton, to reload your main tweet stream, you sim­ply now scroll up, hold for a sec­ond, and Tweetie will check for new tweets.

More third-party ser­vice sup­port — You can now use ser­vices such as Favstar.fm (which we’ve cov­ered here), Tweet Blocker, and Fol­low Cost.

Live-filtering search — At the top of your tweet stream is a Search Time­line option from which you can search your stream. The best part about this is that it fil­ters as you type. Very sexy. You can also search your men­tions this way.

New tweet options — Bring­ing up the tweet box (the area where you write your tweets) if faster than ever. But there are also a range of new options if you hit the 140 char­ac­ter counter. You can now eas­ily geo­tag tweets (pre­sum­ably this will work with the Twit­ter Geolo­ca­tion API when it goes live, but for now it inserts a Google Map link), search for hash­tags to include, and even search the peo­ple you fol­low to find some­one to @ reply to (this is very nice).

Draft man­ager — If you’re the kind of per­son who writes tweets to send at a later time, Tweetie 2 has a draft man­ager where you can save mul­ti­ple drafts of tweets.

New tweet stream options — One of the nice fea­tures about Tweetie from the get go was that swip­ing a tweet to the right brought up a range of options for things you could do with that tweet. Tweetie 2 o offers even more of these includ­ing new ways to retweet, quote tweets, post a link to a tweet, mail tweets, and trans­late tweets. If there is a link in the tweet, you also have a bunch of options.

Noti­fi­ca­tions — Yes, you can now get Push Noti­fi­ca­tions for spe­cific users’ tweets on your device. [Update: My bad, these are not Push Noti­fi­ca­tions, but rather a way to tog­gle on and off the SMS noti­fi­ca­tions that Twit­ter sends.]

Cre­ate iPhone con­tacts from Twit­ter pro­files — Pretty self-explanatory, pretty awesome.

Saved searches — The searches you save on Twitter.com are now synced with Tweetie.

Land­scape — The whole app now works in Land­scape mode. Or you can dis­able that.

Full Story at: http://www.techcrunch.com/

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