TwitterFon’s iPhone app is broken. Here’s the hack to fix it

TwitterFon, a Twitter application for the iPhone, has recently become my most-used app. So when it breaks — quitting several seconds after starting up, as it has been for the past several days — that’s a problem. But never fear dear readers and TwitterFon addicts, there is a solution.

Visit this page (either on your computer or in the web browser on your iPhone) and simply enter your Twitter username and password at the bottom of the page and hit the ‘Start to patch’ button. Yes, it may look a little sketchy, but it works. (The script will not save any of your information, and the code is completely available online to prove it.) And be sure to bookmark the page, because you may have to come back here a few times, as this is only a temporary fix and the core problem remains.

A proper fix for the issue is coming, but until Apple approves the latest version of TwitterFon — which developer Kazuho Okui submitted to the App Store last week — this will have to do.

Speaking of the issue, for those interested, it appears to be caused by a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) value in the favorites area that returns a ‘null’ instead of a ‘bool.’ This patch changed that ‘null’ to ‘true,’ which in turn will make you favorite some tweets (Twitter messages) that you didn’t actually favorite, but you can easily go into Twitter an un-favorite them later.

While this bug may have turned some off from TwitterFon, I still definitely recommend it over any of the other iPhone Twitter apps out there.