App Review: Carbon

If you’re a Twitter junky then webOS is a great mobile OS to be on. The App Catalog is abound with quality Twitter clients to suit the usage model and tastes of just about anyone. Today, we’re reviewing one of the most anticipated Twitter clients to hit the catalog in some time: Carbon by developer dots & lines. This app has been in beta release for several months and for many of those testing it, it has become their daily driver. That’s impressive considering the pitfalls beta software often brings, such as instability and quirky bugs.

So, why then would so many webOS users want to use beta software when there are already quality clients in the catalog, including stalwarts like Bad Kitty and the open-source Spaz? We’ll try to answer that question now, as Carbon has been released into the wilds of the App Catalog for general consumption. Does it live up to the hype? Let’s dive in and find out.

User Interface

The first thing you’ll notice with Carbon is that it brings its own sense of style to the user interface. The standard theme is what has come to be known amongst the webOS community as “dark”, not unlike Spaz, with a textured and almost industrial feel. With light text on this dark background, Carbon gets good marks for its overall legibility. That’s great news because this gritty urban style extends into every nook and cranny of the app from the preferences panel to the animated loader icon that emerges from the right side of the screen when refreshing your stream. New in the release version is an alternate “light” theme entitled “Oxide” which changes the mood but keeps the same crisp legibility. As always, it’s great for users to have a choice.

Interacting with the app shows that the developer put some serious thought into the user experience, and the results are mostly successful. With buttons always at the ready for both refresh and creating a new tweet, it’s easy to get at the core Twitter functions. Carbon allows you to ‘type to tweet’, mirroring the general Just Type feature of webOS. It is, however, missing some niceties that its competitor Bad Kitty contains, like ‘pull to refresh’ and a forward swipe in the gesture area to refresh. While not containing those features is certainly no deal-breaker, it would be wonderful if they were included in a future release, perhaps with an option to disable them.

Carbon brings something new to webOS Twitter clients: panels. Finally with a flick of the finger, users are able to access separate pages for the timeline, mentions, and direct messages. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Panels give immediate access to these core Twitter features without having to back-step with gestures or buttons. Switching between the panels is quick and intuitive. Seconds after using it, it becomes second nature and essential – so much in fact that it makes using the aforementioned competitors frustrating in comparison.

No matter what panel you’re in, Carbon provides a continuous and constant set of buttons located at the top of the screen that give access to search, your personal profile information, and a button that shows either trends or your lists depending on your preference. In general, with Carbon, you’re never more than a button press or finger-swipe away from a wealth of features and information.

Features

Where to begin? If there was an alternate name in the developer’s playbook, it must have been ‘Features’, because Carbon is just loaded with them. The developer lists in their press-kit the features below as contained in the release version of the app:

• Multi-Panel Home Screen: Users can switch timelines by swiping right or left in order to navigate through different timelines.
• Configurable Menu: Users can choose a default user menu on home screen and choose between Trends or Lists to be shown on home screen.
• Power Scroll Gesture: Jumping to the top or bottom of any timeline is as easy as swiping up or down using two fingers.
• Just Type: on webOS 2.x users can use Just Type to quickly launch Carbon to either Search Twitter or Post a new Tweet.
• Type to Tweet in Carbon: Users can type on any Carbon screen to start composing a tweet, reply or mentioning users.
• #Hash Card: A dedicated webOS card that loads tweets with a certain hash tag or search keyword. It automatically adds the selected hash tag to composed tweets in composition screen. This is a highly useful feature for the times that users follow an event or tweet from it.
• Compose Card: If configured, upon tapping on New Tweet button Carbon loads a separate card for composing and posting tweets.
• Account Card: Every account could be opened in a separate Card
• Top-to-Bottom & Bottom-to-Top reading: Upon refreshing any timeline, users are able to configure weather they want to read from the bottom of the newly loaded tweets or start from the top so once timeline refreshes it jumps to the selected end.
• Gap Detection: At any given time depending on the breaks between sessions and refreshes; timelines might skip tweets. Gap detection makes it possible to navigate and load tweets between sessions and distant refreshes so that users never miss a tweet.
• Video Preview & Direct Video Playback: Tweets that include videos hosted on YouTube or YFrog could be previewed and played back directly in Carbon without opening web browser cards.
• Threaded Direct Messages View: Direct Messages are grouped by conversations based on senders & recipients. The conversation view includes a quick composition field for quick replies.
• Drafts: Carbon supports saving drafts. Users can save drafts for normal tweets, replies and direct messages.
• Tweet I’m Replying to: If configured, users can see the tweet they reply to on the composition screen.
• Read Later Services: Carbon saves directly to Instapaper & Read It Later.
• My Bit.ly: Users can use their own bit.ly api key to shorten URLs using their own accounts or custom short domain names.
• Quoting Tweets: Unlike old-school twitter clients Carbon makes use of the official Retweet function of Twitter and adds an option to Quote tweets in three styles. 1. “RT @name:….” 2. “(via @name)” 3. “tweet”
• Share Tweets: Share via SMS or Email or even copy link to tweet for sharing in any other possible medium.
• Translation: Tweets that are not in English could be translated to English on tweet screen.
• Dark & Light Themes
• Three Tweet Font Sizes

That’s a lot… no, a TON of features. More so than we’ll cover in the review. Some of them have already been mentioned in the User Interface section, so we won’t re-hash them. However we’ll discuss some of the features that we find most significant:

• Multiple account support with each account viewable in a separate card: Multiple account support is nice but nothing new for webOS Twitter apps. However with webOS 2, it is quite wonderful to be able to see each account’s stream open separately within a stack of Cards. No longer do you have to exit out of one stream to access another account. This is just brilliant, and really shows both the power of webOS in comparison to the competition, and the thoughtfulness of Carbon’s creators.
• Threaded direct messages: This feature eases the management of multiple direct messages by separating them by account into threads. This feature is so powerful, and so simple, that we don’t know why it hasn’t been done sooner.
• Drafts: Twitter messages are only 140 characters, so why would you need to save a draft? Because of the limitation of message length, there are cases where crafting the perfect message needs consideration. Sometimes, walking away from a message until a later time leads to reconciliation or reformatting. Then there are times where a user simply is interrupted or doesn’t have time to complete the tweet.  This feature can really come in handy during such instances.
• “Power-scroll” gesture: As a user sometimes you just need to get to the top or bottom of your feed in a hurry. Paging through to the bottom or top of your stream can be a tiresome affair, both mentally and physically. The two-finger flick that the developer has implemented eliminates this fatigue quite handily by taking you to the top or bottom of your feed with one gesture. Cool.
• #Hash Card: Once again Carbon harnesses the power of webOS to create a separate card to keep open an easy way to access a hash-tag search. For the reviewer, this has been used to peruse the constant stream of ‘#webOS’ tweets in search of opinions and potential news without the need to exit out of the regular feed. Again for those with a webOS 2 device and its stackable cards, this is a enticing and useful feature.
• Personal Profile Access/Information: While not covered in their press release, Carbon’s wealth of personal profile information is laudable. Press the large button with your Twitter name on the top bar, and you are greeted with a drop down menu that not only provides personal profile info (including your amount of followers, friends, listed numbers, etc.) but a horizontally-scrollable menu of information including your favorite tweets, retweets listed in a timeline, personal lists, nearby tweets using geo-location, as well as the top public tweets and the general public Twitter timeline. This feature is nothing less than the stuff of a power-tweeter’s dreams. Wow. It’s so well done, and so simple, that it might be Carbon’s best feature.

These are just some of the features that Carbon provides, but the ones found most useful after a few days of use by the reviewer as his ‘daily-driver’ Twitter app. The larger point is that this app has more features than any of its competition. That point can hardly be argued, it’s just a fact. It must be asked: does an app with every feature imaginable work for everyone? In the reviewer’s opinion, no. For some, the amount of features will simply get in the way of how they use a Twitter app. For those users, an app like the still-in-beta and potentially dead-before-arrival PHNX created by long time developer and former DevCast and webOSRadio guest David Strack might be best. It’s a matter of taste and usage-case. Further, some might ponder the question: do the number of features drag the app down in performance?

Performance

Feature-creep is a haunting devil. As a rule, the more stuff added equals a proportionate amount of sloth in the responsiveness of an application – desktop or mobile. Not here. Simply put, Carbon is fast. Surprisingly fast, actually, considering everything it has to offer. It’s apparent that the developer has spent some time polishing Carbon to make sure that its bevy of features don’t take away from its usability and performance. Having a large amount of beta testers for an extended period of time was most likely very helpful, and it’s apparent in Carbon’s initial release form. It just works. It’s quite a feat, actually. In extended use it was hard to find a time where the app actually bogged down, even with multiple cards open and several accounts in use. Impressive, to say the least.

That said, we’ve experienced a bug that started with the beta app and has continued on with the initial released version from the catalog: sometimes when the app refreshes, whether manually or on its own, the app gives an error message referring to problems with authorization and Twitter: specifically: “401: Incorrect Signature”. This happens frequently, whether connected via wifi or a mobile date connection, and needs to be fixed as soon as possible (note: The reviewer is using a Sprint-ified Pre2 with webOS 2.1 installed). This is one small black mark on an app that has otherwise performed without incident. Hopefully with maintenance updates this issue will be rectified – and sooner rather than later. Our fingers are crossed.

Summary

With the release of Carbon, a gauntlet has been thrown. This is a beast of an app that belies its depth with a relatively simple and clean user interface as well as remarkable speed. It’s wonderfully feature-rich while not pushing those features in the face of the user. While it may not be to everyone’s taste, for now it offers the best combination of power, ease-of-use, and unique touches to make it arguably the best Twitter application available now in the webOS App Catalog.

Addendum: Check out the latest preNotes recording for some great information about Carbon.