As many of you probably know by now, I’m a big fan of Friendfeed – it’s easily my favorite social networking site – a place I enjoy visiting every day, on my Mac and on the iPhone. When a new iPhone Friendfeed app – like the newly released Stir – I’m not just interested, I’m installing it straight away.
So I installed Stir over the weekend as soon as I saw it mentioned – at Friendfeed (FF) of course – and have been using it and comparing it with my current favorite iPhone FF client, BuddyFeed.
Though I’ve only had Stir for a relatively short time, I’ve already got to know it a fair bit, and of course have some early impressions of it to share.
What’s To Like?
Stir has a friendly and attractive UI – that feels comfortable to spend time in. As in, it looks good.
Your own main timeline – which for some reason is placed below a general ‘Everyone’ view on the main sections page of the app – offers a good summary view of posts from people you subscribe to, as shown in the screencap at the top of this post. As you browse this view, you can easily use one tap on the main body of a post of interest to jump to that individual post, or tap the blue arrow at the right of a post to view it in an inline browser.
As you can see above, within an individual post you’ve got web links (if included in the post), quick links to photos, and nice big buttons along the bottom to Like this post, add a comment to it, or share it.
Tapping the Sharing button pulls up options to email the post, share it via Facebook, or add it to Instapaper.
Post Entries, comments, and likes are broken out on 3 tabs within the individual post view. This is different to BuddyFeed, which puts them all in one view – and I’m not sure what I think of this yet. It presents a bit cleaner view I guess, but at the expense of needing an extra tap to see comments, for example.
The app handles embedded media nicely – and lets you get to a YouTube video, for example, with less taps than in BuddyFeed …
Stir puts a lot of emphasis on photos – which is great because Friendfeed offers a constant flow of great photographs if you follow the right people. The app makes it easy to get at some of those lovely photos. Just as one example, it’s easy to tap on the photos button on the bottom bar when you’re on a Group page, and see a gallery of recent images in that group …
Tapping on an individual pic will take you to a full screen view of it – with options to swipe left and right through the gallery or use left and right arrows to navigate through them.
In the timeline views, you’ve got a row of links along the top, just below your username (or other view title). You can use these to filter the content by services – so you can choose to see only content added via Facebook for example. Or only content added via Flickr, or YouTube, and so on. Obviously, this is a pretty cool way to find photos or videos quickly.
Stir also offers a powerful Search ability, with more good options than I can recall seeing in any other iPhone Friendfeed client …
What’s Not So Hot?
This is a 1.0 release, and as often happens in first versions, it feels to me as if there are a lot of big misses in Stir right now, and some things that make it quite awkward to use in places.
Amongst the most notable missing features right now is this – there’s no easy way to see your own comments or likes – you have to do a search that finds these in order to have them show on the main contents page. That’s a big miss in my view, as I’m always keen to be able to have a quick look at posts I commented on recently.
It’s also quite clunky and awkward in places when navigating through the app – often requiring too many ‘Back’ sort of taps to get somewhere once you’ve drilled down a few levels into a post or similar.
It would benefit greatly from being able to set what you want your ‘Home’ view to be, and maybe having a button to go that page on all other views – instead of having to tap your way back through the hierarchy of views at many times, or go back to the main contents page.
Another example of a feature that’s missing / implemented clumsily is the viewing of another user’s profile. To get to where you can see their Bio requires quite a few taps and takes you all the way out to an inline browser that needs a bit of zooming to see it properly. I’d much rather see this displayed better within the main body of the app, without the browser.
The ‘Load More’ link on timeline pages works erratically at best – often just loading up a lot of duplicates of posts you’ve already seen.
Overall
Firstly, a gratuitous Scoble screencap, as no Friendfeed-related post is complete without one …
Despite the gripes mentioned above, I think Stir is another worthy iPhone Friendfeed client, and a very good 1.0 version as well.
It’s not going to displace BuddyFeed as my preferred Friendfeed app right now,and I hope some of its missing bits will get added, and awkward bits addressed, in future updates – but I’ll certainly be keeping it around to get to know it better and see how it progresses.
You can find Stir in the App Store now, priced at $2.99.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks, great post. I love your blog. Can you give me any tips to promote mine? http://www.shatchertech.wordpress.com? Josh
Thanks. Tips for promoting your site = I'm no great veteran or expert, just been at this a few years and very much still learning myself. I'd say write good stuff and cover things you're passionate about, get to know others in your topic area, and use social networks if you have any that you like using anyway.
Patrick – I'm the author of Stir. Thanks for the balanced review. As you rightly pointed out, Stir is currently at v1.0. I'll be improving it continuously over the coming weeks, and—thanks to your feedback—I have several places to dive into.
Cheers,
Aaron
Hi Aaron – thanks for commenting here. I look forward to seeing how this app develops. I'll look out for news on Friendfeed or even here if you like.
Sounds good. You can find the official Stir group on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/stirapp.
Cheers,
Aaron
Cool – just joined it.
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