Up until a few months ago, if you wanted to have a Twitter widget in Notification Center, you would have had to go the jailbreak way and find a tweak that would allow you to do just that. But since the release of iOS 8, and Apple opening up its mobile operating software for developers to create extensions, we’ve seen some really neat apps and widgets taking advantage of the new possibilities. NC is one of those.
NC is a new app that lets you add a Twitter widget to the Today tab of Notification Center, and from our usage of the app for the last few days, we can say it works as advertised.
Just like all Twitter-related apps, you will first have to authorize NC to access your Twitter account. Once this is done, simply pull down Notification Center and add the widget.
By default, the widget shows the last five tweets in your timeline, but if you go inside the app and scroll down to the bottom, you will have the option to change this to show the last five mentions instead. I must admit that I stumbled upon this setting by accident as it is not very obvious. NC’s developer Akhil Tolani tells me this is on purpose, something that I don’t clearly understand, but he probably knows better than me.
The widget will refresh every time you pull Notification Center down. From there, you can tap on a tweet to bring up several options. You can favorite a tweet, retweet it, and open that tweet in the official Twitter app. If you don’t have the official Twitter app but have Tweetbot installed, it will default to Tweetbot. Based on that feature, I would have wanted the app to let me choose my default Twitter app, which Tolani says could make its way into a future update.
If the name Akhil Tolani sounds familiar, it’s because we have featured his work on iDB many times before. More recently, Tolani released Music Center, a widget that lets you view your entire music library from Notification Center.
NC is $0.99 in the App Store, and if you’re a Twitter nuts, this will be well worth the price.
- Download NC