With an update released last night, Twitterrific has gained a new facial recognition feature that properly frames people’s faces in timeline photos. The Iconfactory’s Gedeon Maheux writes:

By far the coolest of these improvements is the use of Apple’s facial recognition APIs to improve image previews. What does that mean exactly? It means that as Twitterrific displays media thumbnails in the timeline (pictures, videos, etc), the app tries to detect faces and frame the thumbnail so faces are always showing. In short, if Twitterrific sees a face in a tweet, it tries to make sure you see it too!

The effect when scanning through your list of tweets in the timeline can be dramatic. Previously Twitterrific always framed thumbnails on the center of images, but many times people’s faces aren’t in the middle, especially on portrait shots. Check out these before and after comparison screen shots to see the difference facial framing makes in the timeline.

This is a great example of how an iOS API seemingly unrelated to Twitter clients can dramatically improve the experience of an app. Very clever.