I RP frequently from my iPhone, and with the holiday season upon us, I figure there will be lots of folks with new iPhones and iPod Touches in the RP, so I'm going to write up a little guide about the things I've learned by RPing on an iPhone. I will refer to iPhones and iPod Touches together by lumping them in as iPhones - but know the only real difference is the iPod Touch users can only RP where there is wifi.
First, the iPhone is an amazingly productive device to RP on. You always have it with you, so you can stay in touch and fire off messages quickly and easily. There are some great Twitter applications available for the iPhone as well, and that greatly helps with RP.
Here's how I use the iPhone for RP. I'm a fan of the native Twitter app (simply called Twitter for iPhone), and it works VERY well and it's free. It supports multiple accounts for those of you with a ton of alts. However, I don't use it for one reason: it seems to refresh DMs on a fixed schedule, and not on demand. This makes coordinating privately on SLs very difficult.
My twitter client of choice is currently Osfoora. I've tried most others, and keep coming back to it. It's got great multiple account support, has a very handy address book to pick names from in the event you can't remember someone's Twitter ID, and it lets you refresh all aspects of your timeline, including DMs, on command. It costs $2.99 but if you're going to do any heavy RP on your iPhone it's $2.99 that's well spent.
The next application that's critical for Twitter RP is called Boxcar. What Boxcar does is provide near-instant notification of tweets in your timeline via the Apple Push Notification system.
You can setup Boxcar to monitor multiple Twitter accounts... and you can have it sound a different beep when tweets land in different accounts. This is essential if you want to remain on top of things in your timeline. I've become dependent on Boxcar to beep at me even when I'm using my computer - because it simply is that good at what it does.
Boxcar can be configured to pop up a push notification message over the top of whatever you are doing if you choose, so you can see @ tweets or DMs if you choose. This is highly configurable as well, so you can have it display the contents of the tweet, or simply say "you have a tweet", or not display a message at all.
Boxcar can also be a fully fledged Twitter client if you choose to use it as such. It's not as nice as Twitter for iPhone or Osfoora, but it's got that functionality.
Boxcar's price has floated between $2.99 and free. At the moment of this writing it's free, but that may change. It's well worth the $2.99 if you see it at that price - don't wait for a sale for it to be free. It's a great app.
So, for between $3 and $6, you can setup your iPhone or iPod Touch to be a very effective Twitter RP system. For the price of a print magazine, you can tweet from anywhere in near-real time.
OOC: I've been doing this from my iPod touch since day one, so here are my thoughts on this.
ReplyDeleteClient: If I'm just doing one account, (Which is rare, but it happens!) I use Osfoora on my iPod touch 2G. Normally though, I'm RPing as more than one person, or I'm even RPing and being on my Real Life (RL) account at the same time, I use Echofon Pro, which I bought in a moment of weakness. Echofon free is just fine, and in fact that's what I used exclusively for almost three months.
Boxcar: If you're using Twitter for iPhone, Boxcar is a MUST HAVE, even if you just set it up for DMs.
Other tools I have for RP:
IM Lite. I use this for AIM and Google Talk chats about the Storyline. (Free!)
Angry Birds and (Most recently), Red Nova (Each $0.99). Yeah, I know that these are games But there is always that one person who takes 10 minutes + to reply. Those two games are both short, and in the case of Red Nova, you don't last more than a few minutes anyway, so yeah.
DoodleBuddy: One of those things that you should have, because every now and again you'll come across a tweet SO EPIC that you need to take a screenshot (Sleep+Home button at the same time) and then post it, but there might be something in there that you need to edit out, so that's why it's in my must-haves.
Google Image search. OK, so this isn't an app, it's an Safari Bookmark. Same difference. You'll need this so you can find the best looking avatar for your character - although after more than a few weeks, you'll have collected a decent stock of avatars for use when you get tired of your current one.
And those are my apps that I couldn't RP without. I guess I could live without the games or maybe (At least now that Twitter for iPhone has push) Boxcar, but that is what makes me and my accounts on twitter tick. :)
--JimG,
@Antilles_
@Ben__Skywalker :)