Development on Twitter’s mobile apps has been speeding right along lately.
Twitter for BlackBerry v1.1 just launched with updates for location, push notifications and much more that bring it up to speed with official offerings on iOS and Android.
Here’s a list of the biggest updates:
Location. As simple as it sounds: you can now add your geolocation to every tweet. This has been a basic feature on Twitter.com and most mobile apps for awhile now, so it’s good that Twitter for BlackBerry finally got it.
Push @mentions. This one has also been a long time coming. If somebody mentions you in a tweet, the app immediately pushes a notification to your phone
Chat-style messages. Like the rebranding listed below, “Direct Messages” have been renamed “Messages” to align with Twitter.com. The chat interface has also been updated to feel more like a chat experience.
#Topic autocomplete. After typing in a hash symbol (#), the app will now suggest hashtags based on hashtags previously seen in tweets, retweets, searches or elsewhere.
Refreshed branding. Graphics in the app have been updated to “reflect the new look of the Twitter brand” and layout of icons on the home screen have been streamlined.
Retweet updates. When you retweet someone’s post, it will instantly appear in your timeline as “Retweeted by You,” a nice visual confirmation that the retweet worked.
Language support. Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Polish, Czech and Thai have all been added as supported languages.
This latest upgrade for BlackBerry follows a slightly dramatic uproar in the Twitterverse over the QuickBar, introduced in Twitter’s latest update to its iOS apps as a means of displaying trending topics and Promoted Trends. Lovingly nicknamed the #DickBar, the bar was removed less than a month after its original release and just a day after Jack Dorsey’s return to Twitter as head of product.
Twitter for Android was last updated in February with a few minor fixes.
Looming over all these updates now are reports that UberMedia, developer of several mobile Twitter applications, has plans to build its own microblogging service. In the interim, Twitter would do well to snatch as many users from third party clients as it can.
