July 26, 2014
You’re probably aware that Twitter [1] began supporting animated GIFs [2] via its web interface in mid-June . If so, you may recall Twitter’s iOS client gained support for this popular file format a mere week later .
The feature isn’t exclusive to the company’s own mobile apps: Twitter immediately updated its API [3] to let makers of third-party clients implement direct GIF sharing via pic.twitter.com links.
Tapbots’ Tweetbot [4] , one of the best Twitter clients for the Mac and iOS devices, does not officially recognize these animated GIF links. As a result, tapping a pic.twitter.com GIF link in Tweetbot’s iOS app opens the detail view for the tweet itself rather than play the embedded animated GIF inline. It’s been driving me nuts â€" but not anymore.
As it turns out, Tapbots yesterday issued a maintenance update to Tweetbot for the iPhone and iPod touch which apparently adds support for animated GIFs via Twitter’s own pic.twitter.com links. Strangely enough, the official release notes make no mention of this whatsoever… [5]
As first noticed by Aldrin Calimlim of AppAdvice [6] , updating your Tweetbot 3 copy to version 3.4.1 makes animated GIFs play within the app.
I can confirm that this is true.
With the previous Tweetbot 3.4 installed on my iPhone, I tapped the animated GIF embedded in this example tweet [7] , to no avail. As can be seen on the screenshots top of post, Tweetbot simply took me to the tweet detail view.
Downloading the latest Tweetbot 3.4.1 all of a sudden has made tweets with embedded animated GIFs show inline with a play icon, indicating the media could be played within the app. Tap the icon and Tweetbot reproduces the embedded animated GIF, as depicted below, but not inside the timeline.
Instead, Tweetbot passes the link to the iOS media player which appears as a card hovering above your timeline. There’s a full screen button that can be tapped to enjoy the animation without any UI distractions. You can also pause the playback and access other standard iOS media player controls as you normally would.
This is how Tweetbot now appears to handle animated GIFs in both the latest version of iOS 7 and the iOS 8 Beta 4. It’s notably different to how Tweetbot handles pic.twitter.com links for regular images or App Store links, both of which render inline.
If I had to take a wild guess here, I’d say Tapbots has decided to use iOS’s built-in media player as a stop-gap solution of sorts as they work on implementing animated GIFs inline. Regardless, this is great news because previously, you had to paste a tweet link into your web browser to let Twitter’s web app animate the GIF.
My first thought was that this may be a backend issue on Twitter’s end, but there’re still third-party clients out there that don’t support pic.twitter.com links for animated GIFs at all.
For those wondering, Tweetbot for Mac still won’t do animated GIFs.
The only viable explanation must be that Tapbots has either forgotten to mention this feature in its release notes or the company intentionally isn’t making any fuss about it, perhaps to quietly test the feature with its customers.
At any rate, release notes accompanying the download mention three minor improvements : a fix for iOS 8 beta issues, another fix dealing with Flickr image previews and various other bug fixes.
Tweetbot for the iPhone and iPod touch is $4.99 in the App Store. [8]
The native app requires iOS 7.0 or later.
If you want the extend your Tweetbot experience to the Mac, the OS X client will run you $19.99. [9] .
Links
- ^ Twitter (idownloadblog.com)
- ^ animated GIFs (idownloadblog.com)
- ^ updated its API (dev.twitter.com)
- ^< /a> Tweetbot (idownloadblog.com)
- ^ Tweetbot for the iPhone and iPod touch (itunes.apple.com)
- ^ AppAdvice (appadvice.com)
- ^ this example tweet (twitter.com)
- ^ Tweetbot for the iPhone and iPod touch is $4.99 in the App Store. (itunes.apple.com)
- ^ run you $19.99. (itunes.apple.com)
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