Back in December 2009 Amanda Rose, organiser of the worldwide Twestival event, was looking ways in which to help people connect at the offline event. Having attended the event previously, the Future Workshops crew thought we could bring something unique, fun and interesting to the table. Hence, the Twestival iPhone App (iTunes link) was born!

There are a number of Fully Blown Twitter Clients on the App Store today (Tweetie 2 is a favourite for us - such clean design!), so we decided to stand on the shoulders of giants by creating a Complementary App.

Complementary Apps allow you build an extremely focused product, whilst delegating functionality to other fully featured Apps. In our case, we wanted to focus on reading local Tweets, meeting other Twestival attendees, and keeping up to date with local fundraising activities principals. We also enabled local Twestival administrators to update schedule information on their profile page that would be fed real-time to the App. Everybody would then know about last-minute changes to local plans!

Our App would then connect to the user's selected Twitter client, where they would be able to compose and send Tweets using the local hashtag or Twitter handle. This way we removed a large amount of complexity (uploading photos, videos, location etc), in order build a great Twestival App.

I've posted an infographic below, illustrating the difference between Fully Blown and Complementary Apps. Feel free to grab and reuse!

Figure 1 - An infographic illustrating Complementary Apps

Update: The Official Twestival Blog has some coverage of the iPhone App here

Update 2: The Huffington Post has a nice article on the Twestival, include a paragraph on the App here