When the graphical user interface was invented, there were people who thought it was a huge waste of system resources, and that people should simply learn how to interact with their computers via the command line. Those old men, relics of the past, were of course wrong, and both Apple and Microsoft “wasted” system resources to make desktop computers easy to use. Take that same concept of “wasting” both CPU and GPU horsepower and you’ve got the iPhone, with eye candy in every nook and cranny, it took the concept of a phone a mere functional tool, to something that can be a joy to play with. Twario [iTunes link] takes the iPhone’s playfulness one step further and has transformed the act of reading Twitter, into one of rekindling the past, when you spent hours in front of a small television, making an Italian plumber jump on the backs of turtles and throw fireballs.
It’s a little expensive for what it does, coming in at $2, and while we can’t determine how effective it is as increasing your Twitter productivity (oxymoron) since no one on our team is willing to spend their hard earned cash on the application, if you’re the type of person who likes to show off their toy in order to justify the insane price you’ve paid for it, then pick up Twario. You tilt your iPhone left and right to interact with your timeline and then you tap the screen to make your character jump on a tweet to do things such as reply or retweet.
There will be a day when every interaction with a mobile phone will be like this, and that day is going to suck for utilitarian people such as myself, but thankfully Microsoft is taking the no bullshit approach with Windows Phone 7. It’s just going to take a few generations for that platform to not be totally lame.