The new twitter update shows that Twitter took control of things and brought the experience we have had on Android and Blackberry on Windows phone. They overhauled the UI and made the UX quite something. Below are the notable features that were added and are indeed quite necessary and overdue:
Push messages
Upon the update that doesn’t come the usual way, (You will have to search for the app in the store and there you will see the option to update.) you will get prompts on whether you would like to get push notifications, of which I am sure you will click yes, trust me, it’s a good idea. Those blue dots on the twitter icons for home, mentions, and discover do look good when you have new notifications.
Pull to refresh
You will no-longer need to tap the icon below there to refresh, pull to refresh picks on where you had left and if the timeline is quite busy, you will have that skipped tweets bridge that you can always tap to reveal.
Quote tweet
One other reason I couldn’t stand this app. You don’t want to give all the credit to a tweet by retweeting, you want to quote it so you get retweeted. 🙂
Lock screen
Push notifications also comes with another child, lock screen notifications, you can have alerts of mentions on the homescreen at will, just go to lock screen settings.
Multi-user
I manage the @techweez twitter account and also run the twitter account of Techweez Editor, which is @martingicheru and would want to access them like I would with other apps. Previously I have had to use Peregrine and MoTweets, the latter has some shortcomings.
Tap top to scroll up
Previously you would have to wade your way through the tweets if you were down there. That small feature of tapping the home icon if you are on the timeline or the @icon if you are on mentions comes in handy if you want to go up the timeline.
Image preview
You can preview images on the timeline, no need to open on external browser.
As I said, these are features available to users on other platforms, just Windows phone finally getting some love from Twitter. Guess it’s coming of age.
