My Mobile Pack Choose yours…

From all appearances, Appl-gasm Apps seems to be on a mission to create the ideal Twitter app. Its latest offering, SneakyTweet, improves upon the developer’s TvvitterBug Twitter client. Despite some unique features, though, SneakyTweet suffers from some services that are difficult or nearly impossible to figure out.

Tweeting on the Sly: Among SneakyTweet’s stand-out features are geolocation capabilities (including the ability to disguise where you’re tweeting from) and a tweet-encoding feature that, frankly, is hit or miss.

After you download SneakyTweet, go to the Settings app and enter your Twitter account information. The app supports up to five different screen names. Once that data’s in place, you can launch SneakyTweet and dive into its many customization options.

Similar to TvvitterBug, SneakyTweet’s main screen has five tabs, with 12 feed options. Depending on your preference, you can assign different timelines, different retweet feeds, direct messages, favorite tweets, and on and on. A button in the top left corner with gears printed on it opens up all of these options.

There is also a List function, which you can use to create custom feeds with only certain friends. You can also assign a tab to display a feed of a trending topic you’re interested in tracking.

Once your display settings are in order, SneakyTweet offers another layer of customization, this one involving your own tweeting. The app provides a simple keyboard tab for composing a message, along with a toolbar tab for all of the fancy stuff.

You can tweet pictures (choose from four different Twitter picture services) as well as shorten URLs using TinyURL. All you have to do is type in a URL, tap the URL button, and watch it transform. You’re supposed to be able to post video as well, but I found that every video I selected would freeze the app or appear to load but not show up in the tweet.

These services are pretty standard in all good Twitter clients, but SneakyTweet has a few unique extras. Like many other apps, it uses geolocation but you’re also able to disguise your location by typing in where you’d like to be. Hopefully none of your followers really thinks you’re tweeting from Antarctica.

Another unique feature is Sneaky Tweet’s Streaming-Tweet capability. This option is particularly welcome—I’ve often found myself debating whether to publish a two-part tweet in order, or write the sections backward so they show up in a logical order on my feed. SneakyTweet lets you type tweets as long as you want, then breaks them up into multiple messages that read top-to-bottom.

The app’s last—and sadly, most unintuitive—special feature is TweetSecret, a function that allows you to protect your tweets so that only certain followers with your magic code can read them. When I submitted an encoded tweet using TweetSecret, though, it showed up as a garbled message with a lock icon next to it.

You can tap the blue arrow within the app and see your profile with a box for a decode key. Originally I thought it was a place to set my code, so I typed something in. But I still couldn’t read my own encoded tweets, and when I tried to delete the code, the app wouldn’t let me.

Ordinarily, this is where I’d consult the help section, but SneakyTweet doesn’t have one. There are no tips in the App Store and the SneakyTweet Support link within the store is broken as of this writing (though it’s easy enough to add “.com” to the improperly entered URL). After all that, you’ll learn that the Applgasm site’s only support involves a demo that still doesn’t explain where to enter someone’s code in order to see encrypted tweets. And, of course, there’s certainly nowhere to unlock tweets from Twitter’s Website.

Suffice it to say, SneakyTweet needs a major update. Though most of its functions are intuitive, the app is already flush with options, so a help section certainly wouldn’t spoil any simplicity. The app is also crash prone, possibly because it has so many things are going on at once. SneakyTweet is packed with great functions and its $3 price would be a great deal, if only all of these features worked.