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Welcome to the latest in depth review of the most popular Twitter applications for your BlackBerry. If you have not been keeping up with our efforts to date you can go back and check out our BlackBerry Twitter Application Rankings for some great insight as to which applications are best suited for your particular usage of Twitter on the go.

Today we dig into Yatca for your BlackBerry!

Getting Started

The first step to enjoying Yatca is to grab the application OTA by clicking the following link from within your BlackBerry browser: Download Yatca now!

Unfortunately for those of you wishing to download the application and install it via Desktop Manager, there is no option to suit your needs. The OTA download is the only method for installing the Twitter application.

When you access the above link you will be asked by your BlackBerry to grant the application permissions. Just click allow and you will be on your way to tweeting with Yatca in no time (After you agree to the User Agreement of course).

Once you have agreed to the fact that sending and receiving data through Yatca without a data plan could end up costing you mucho dinero, you will have to enter in some initial data to get your account set up.

Choosing your Yatca Options

The first step in the setup is to choose which MicroBlogging service you would like to update with Yatca. We are focusing on Yatca as a Twitter client for the purpose of this review but you have a number of options for updating various services. Currently, Twitter (default), identi.ca, TWIT.tv and Other Laconica (not sure what that is) are all options.

The second step in the setup is to enter in your Username and Password for the Twitter service. Be sure to enter this information correctly or you will be greeted with a Network Exception Tunnel Failure error (which is never fun).

Next we move on to choosing your preferred image storing service. Most people will just leave this setting as default because they have no prefered online image hosting service. For those of you that do choose favorites, you will have the option of choosing from img.ly, Pikchur, TweetPhoto (default), Twitgoo, TwitPic and yfrog.

One of the bigger issues with Twitter applications on the BlackBerry is that they can have a negative impact on your battery life when left running in the background day to day. In order to combat that you can adjust the Yatca connection options. The general idea is that the longer period of time you set between polling for updates the better it is for your battery life.

With Yatca you have the option of telling it to update on any of the following increments: 15 min (default), None, 30 min, 1 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours.

If your BlackBerry is company owned you are most likely hooked up on a BES server. If so then you will want to change the option for using BES/MDS when available to YES rather than the default NO option.

Filtering your incoming and outgoing Yatca messages

Yatca handles messages received from Twitter a little differently than other Twitter apps we have reviewed. Instead of displaying your incoming and outgoing tweets in tabs within the app itself, Yatca integrates with your messages folder directly. This means all of your tweets from friends get merged with other types of messages.

There are a number of option provided at setup that allow you to filter both incoming and outgoing messages in an attempt to streamline what makes it into your folder after each update. Filters can be applied various types of tweets. These include Merged, Non-Merged and Discarded.

Merged: These are messages that will be displayed in your messages folder along with email and sms notifications etc.
Non-Merged: These messages will not show up in your messages folder but instead will be stored in the Yatca folder which is created by the app upon installation.
Discarded: These messages will be ignored and are not stored on your BlackBerry at all.

NOTE: If you do not set the “Check for Mentions of You” option to yes (NO by default) then you will only see replies that are sent to you by people you are following. If you want to see all mentions of you you must set the option to yes.

Setting up a Custom Yatca Search

With all of your non-merged messages now finding a home in the new Yatca subfolder in your messages folder, it can sometimes be a pain to find them all. There is no shortcut to access that folder from your main screen so it now requires a few clicks to get what you want. This is less than ideal so some intelligent folks have come up with a solution. The solution is a custom search!

From Trevor Longs Blog:

1. While in the messages folder, press Menu > Search
2. In the search window, leave the search term blank and change the folder to Yatca or Yatca un-merged.
3. Press Menu > Save to save this as a custom search.
4. Name the search (I used Yatca) and choose a shortcut key (I used Alt + Y). Press Menu > Save once more to finalize the saved search.
5. You can now see all your friends timelines by pressing ALT+Y while in your messages folder.

Setting up your custom Yatca Alerts

If you have decided that Yatca is going to be your Twitter application of choice for your BlackBerry then you will most likely want to set up some custom LED notifications.

To set up your Yatca alerts simply navigate to your BlackBerry Profiles and scroll down until you see “Advanced”. Click on it then highlight the desired profile and press Menu > Edit.

Scroll all the way down the page until you see “Yatca Updates and Replies”. Click on it and you will see all of the possible options for setting up your notifications.

Once you have made the changes required, press Menu > Save and back out of the settings interface. Yatca will now notify you as per your settings.

Interacting with your Twitter Network with Yatca

Updating your Yatca status is easily done by either using the icon that gets placed in your apps list or by hitting the Menu button from anywhere on your BlackBerry. If you are anywhere but the messages folder you will see a simple “Update yatca Status” at the top of your menu. Click it and Tweet away.

Managing your Yatca Messages

If you are in the messages folder you will have a few added options. In your menu you will see a number of contextual Yatca actions you can choose to initiate.

1. Refresh Yatca Now: clicking this will refresh your Yatca stream right away instead of waiting for your scheduled poll to take place.
2. Pause Yatca Refresh: clicking this will temporarily pause any Yatca updates that were scheduled to take place.
3. Mark all Yatca Items Read: Exactly as it sounds – it will mark all of your current Yatca messages as read.
4. Delete Read Yatca Items: Clicking this will purge all of your Yatca messages from your messages folder.
5. Yatca Options: this option takes you back to the initial settings described earlier in the review. You can change and save any of your settings with this feature.

Responding to Messages with Yatca

Responding to a message received with Yatca is a simple process. Just click on any message in your messages folder and you will see a screen with the Username, their tweet and three links.

The Reply link brings up a standard reply box with the @username already entered. Just type out your message and click Send. If you would like to add a photo you can do so from this screen as well.

The Forward link brings up the option to ReTweet the currently selected message or send it to another contact via SMS or Email.

The Favorite link allows you to tag the individual tweet as a favorite so you can come back to it later on.

At this time, sending Direct Messages to your followers through Yatca is not officially although the plan on making this an available option with a later release.

HINT: You can still send direct messages through the Yatca application by typing “D + contact_name + message” Where contact name is the user you want to direct message. (Do not include the + signs).

Sending Pics through Yatca

Sending photos through Twitter updates is as easy as opening up a reply screen or a new Yatca update and clicking onthe Photo link.

When clicked that link will give you the option of taking a new picture using your BlackBerry camera or choosing an existing image from your camera roll. Whichever option you choose, a new dialog box will appear and prompt you to upload the chosen photo. Once your photo has been uploaded it will automatically be placed in the body of your outgoing tweet. Simply add any additional text you may need and click on the send link to release it to the world.

Final Thoughts of Yatca

Yatca is a very different animal than every other Twitter application available for the BlackBerry. It is definitely not going to be the preferred application for most users but should find a place in the hearts of those with smaller Twitter networks.

I found that my messages box was swamped with the twenty-two thousand plus followers the BBGeeks feed has accumulated. Having all of your awesome tweets showing up in my inbox was great except for the fact that I could no longer see any email or any other type of message that was sent to that folder. Not to mention what effect that it was having on my battery life.

Playing with the filter settings (as described above) worked well for streamlining all @BBGeeks responses and mentions which are the ones I absolutely need to see.

That being said, the message handling was my only issue. Everything else worked well and was exactly where I wanted it to be. Having the “Update Yatca Status” option at the top of every menu no matter where I was in my BlackBerry made posting updates quick and easy.

If you have a smaller twitter following then I would definitely suggest Yatca as an option for tweeting on your BlackBerry. With the correct filters applied you will have all of your messages in a central location and you will love how seamlessly Yatca is integrated into your daily BlackBerry routine.

If you have a large Twitter following and would prefer an option that allows you to see a little more about what is going on in the world of those you are following then I suggest you look at one of the other Twitter applications available for your device.

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