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Earlier this month we learned that BlackBerry Twitter client ÜberTwitter would be getting an update. On Saturday we saw them release version 0.75. Later that day they upgraded that to 0.78, owing to a fix in the timeline update issues. So this one has all the fixes and upgrades they promised when we first learned of the new release. After the jump we’ll go over those changes again. Plus, a sneak preview of what will be on tap for the next iteration of ÜberTwitter.

• Cleaned up and modernized the user interface. The timeline interface, tweet update, and tweet view screens have changed substantially, please see the screenshots above.
• Reduced battery drain!
• You can now delete your tweets
• If you are using the internal GPS, we added an icon in the title bar showing if you have a GPS lock (blue icon) or not (gray icon).
• Fixed bug such that ÜberTwitter will now properly fall back to using cell towers for location if you don’t have a GPS lock.
• The ability to follow a thread of replies. Once we added this we kicked ourselves for not having it earlier, it is SO useful! On one of the screen shots above you’ll see the ‘in reply to’ button on the view tweet screen.
• You can now select to merge both @Replies/Mentions as well as Direct Messages into your timeline
• Direct messages now have their own notification profile. Note that for @replies and DM notification to work you MUST select to have these merged into your timeline
• Integrated Google Maps when viewing a Tweet, works just like the myloc.me web site. This will view the location of the tweet if it includes a ‘myloc.me’ or ‘mypic.me’ or ‘myvid.me’ URL, OR will use the location in the profile if it includes a latitude/longitude pair. This includes support for the iPhone twitter clients which routinely put the geolocation in the Twitter profile location field! Click on the screenshot below for a detailed view. We backtracked on using BlackBerry Maps due to the lack of universal support on all devices/carriers.
• When viewing a tweet that has an embedded picture from mypict.me, you can see how many times the picture has been viewed by either ÜberTwitter users and from the web site.
• When viewing a tweet which contains a latitude/longitude pair in the location field we will now provide the ‘human readable’ address of that location, also works for iPhone geolocations in the Twitter profile location field.
• Fixed the search screen to make ’search’ the default menu item and make the ‘enter’ key start the search.
• Added a separate font/size/style selection for viewing and composing tweet text
• Added the ability to make the timeline font bold
• Added support for the shrinking your tweet through an integration with TweetShrink.com. This will be an option when composing your tweet.
• Added a ‘Copy Tweet’ menu item so you can copy/paste entire tweets into other BlackBerry applications
• Timeline scrolling is MUCH snappier!
• When viewing a DM, the only reply option is with another DM
• Added touch screen gestures for the Storm to go to the top and bottom of the timeline. Swipe ‘east’ goes to the top, and a swipe ‘west’ goes to the botom. Note that we did not use swipe north/south as we are planning to use these gestures in the future to support ‘flick’ scrolling.
• Fixed bug where the selected tweet in a timeline was basically ‘random’ when the timeline was updated. The currently selected tweet will now remain selected after adding tweets to the timeline.
• At the bottom of all timelines there is a row that says ‘Load More’ which will retrieve older tweets for that timeline.
• Fixed bug where the location being reported was ’stuck’ to a previous location.
• Fixed bug where spaces at the front/end of a username would cause it to fail validation.
• Resolved bug where the small gray time of tweet text would sometimes overwrite the other text in a tweet.
• Added support for tweets that contain Moby Pictures (mobypicture.com)
• Fixed bug where selecting ReTweet from timeline menu makes the tweet a reply, so not everyone could see it.
• Fixed bug in WiFi support, on some devices/carrier combinations this would cause a network failure
• Fixed a bug in the reporting of the number of new tweets, the count on the home screen should be accurate now
• Fixed bug where escaping from writing a tweet gave a misleading prompt to save or discard the tweet. Selecting save actually exits without saving the message anywhere. Prompt is now accurate.

For the next update, we’re already looking at the following:

• Automatic and manual URL shortening – All URLs found in the tweet will be shortened
• Integration into the BlackBerry browser such that URLs can be included directly in a tweet from the menu.
• Saved searches – integrate the new Twitter saved search API. Searches saved via the Twitter web site will be useable on ÜberTwitter and vice versa
• Optional automatic scaling of pictures in order to greatly reduce picture upload times.

For now, you can get ÜberTwitter at their website. It’s free, of course, so enjoy and then enjoy some more. Make sure to catch us: @BBGeeks.

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