Twitterrific

First of all, let me say that I love Twitterrific and the developer behind it (Craig Hockenberry). It was given an Apple Design Award at WWDC this year, and rightly so. They've effectively moved all of the interesting features of the desktop Twitterrific to the Cocoa Touch platform, and they've released both a free, ad-supported version and a paid version.

Having said that, there are some bits of Twitterrific that bug me, and might explain why I trade off between it, Twinkle, and Twitter's own mobile website.

Hints

Ok, maybe Icon Factory has discovered that iPhone users are idiots, but I'm a big fan of the "show-don't-tell" school of UI design. If Apple didn't find it necessary to create something like Hints to "tell" about e.g. the new push data ("Fetch New Data") model, then why did Twitterrific need to create it? If this feature is really necessary, then perhaps this simple twitter client is...not so simple.

Complexity without Benefit

Twitterrific is jam-packed with just about as many features as you can currently fit into an iPhone app. They even provide instructions on how to back-link from Safari into Twitterrific, in case you ever dared want to run anything but Twitterrific. (Note: I think it speaks more to Apple's support for third-party developers than anything else that this process requires hand-editing a funky URL.)
Frankly, it's kinda overwhelming, and yet not as powerful as you might think.

Take for instance User Info. Although you can find out all sorts of things about the user: read their latest twit, find out their location, and view their profile, you can't actually unfollow them. The UI design of the twit view itself seems to violate the simple-is-elegant drill-down model of iPhone UI design: with six action buttons available on this one screen, it's quite cluttered.

Conclusion

Overall I think Twitterrific is a terrific iPhone app, and quite powerful. For my friends that use Twitter I highly recommend trying this app first and then compare it with the other hokey Twitter apps available for iPhone. However, I also recommend they try Twinkle and the simple Twitter mobile site for Safari. Some find the many features of Twitterrific indispensable, while others are happy with the simplistic Safari site.