Twitter announced Thursday new updates for its iOS apps, including improved methods for uploading photos and following trends.
All of the following features are immediately available for Twitter on iPad and iPhone:
Quick Bar: The biggest update here now displays trends right at the top of the timeline. Swipe left or right to cycle through trends. As a result of this update, Twitter can more easily display Promoted Trends to mobile users (can you say monetization in 2011?). This update comes to Twitter for iPhone only.
Photos: When wishing to add a photo to a tweet, users now need only click a clearly visible camera icon in the toolbar, which opens up options for taking a new picture or choosing one from the photo library. Users could already add photos to tweets in previous versions of Twitter for iPhone, but this update makes the feature more obvious. (In fact, a few other features that were previously hidden–like usernames for mentions, hashtags and geotagging–are now displayed in the toolbar.)
Follow your friends: Find more people to follow by searching Twitter for contacts stored on your phone.
Local trends: See location-based trends. Previously, users could only see global trends.
Shorten links: This is another one of those features that was already available on old versions of Twitter for iPhone, if you knew where to look. Now the app will shorten your lengthy URLs automatically.
Tweet box design: Now photos, geotagging and other features are more clearly displayed.
Autocomplete: When typing @ or # for mentions or hashtags, the app will autocomplete with the name or word you’re looking for.
Direct Messages: Direct Messages have been streamlined to look more like conversations.
Cleaned up preferences and bug fixes: Enough said.
Twitter for iPhone is the third most popular way to access the service, after Twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com, according to the company. And Twitter for iPad is (surprise, surprise) the most popular way people connect to the site on Apple’s tablet.
