Hands on with Twitter for Windows 8 - sandovalventing

It's tough to conceive that Windows 8 has gone this long—139 days—without an official Twitter app. The sociable network's steady stream of bite-sized updates are tailor-made for the snapping and share-out features of Windows 8. Still since Oct. 26 of last year, users have been forced to seek out unofficial solutions, even as Twitter does its best to hamstring these alternatives.

Just the wait is over. On Wednesday evening, Twitter free an official app for Windows 8. The new app embraces the new modern user interface of Windows, and supports Windows-specific features similar snapping and sharing. Is IT really the Twitter app we've been waiting for, though? Let's take a closer look.

Love it or detest it, the Chitter app features lots of out-of-doors leaden space, just the like other Windows 8 apps.

This looks conversant

If you've ever used Chirrup's iPad app, the Windows 8 app should look for familiar. It has practically the same thin layout, with a single strip of tweets over a gray ground, on with a left sidebar to memory access your mentions, the "discover" section, and your own profile. At a glance, the only mature difference is the use of Windows 8's red-brick-style font. The app flat supports swipe to brush up, so you can easy take in recently tweets by swiping depressed from the top side of your timeline.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll receive a few stylistic differences. The chance on section on Windows 8 scrolls horizontally instead of vertically when in landscape mode, and overall it's Thomas More inviting than its iPad counterpart. The images displayed in this section are larger, and options to reply, retweet and front-runner appear directly on for each one conspicuous tweet. When you tap on nonpareil of these tweets, it immediately opens whatever World Wide Web data link is inside. Profile pages are as sharp in Chirrup's Windows 8 app, with Modern-style tiles for tweets and photos.

The images displayed in the Discover incision are large and play to Windows 8 strengths.

Bodoni-style touches

Twitter has done a well behaved job of load-bearing the unique features of Windows 8. You can search for populate or updates through the Windows 8 Search charm, accessed away dragging your cursor (operating theatre swiping from) the right edge of the screen. Sharing from the charms bar is also gimbaled, so you can e-mail a Twinge operating theatre send on IT to another app without going Twitter.

But the most useful modern-style feature, without interview, is snapping. If you're using another app, such as Internet Explorer, and you've opened Twitter recently, you can rupture your timeline by swiping in from the left bound of the block out until a sidebar appears. The snapped view of Twitter still includes icons for mentions, discover, profile, compose and look, so you still get most of the app's functionality.

Huzzah! The new app thrives when snapped to the side of your screen, as all its important sharing features are still accessible.

Missing features and some other woes

Not everything's nifty about Twitter's Windows 8 app, however.

The biggest problem is the lack of Twitter lists anywhere in the app. Mogul users rely on lists to follow their ducky word sources or specific groups of citizenry. The fact that Twitter continues to ostracize this feature article—often seen American Samoa an unconventional to RSS feeds—is deep worrisome, especially in light of Google Reader's impending demise.

Twitter's Windows 8 app also lacks the radical ability to post a quote squeeze instead of a fitting retweet. That means there's no means to add your own comments as part of a retweet. You can't even manually written matter and paste text within the app.

I also ran into a couple of bugs that crashed the app. It happened once piece opening a Vane varlet and opening the share charm, and again while trying to reply to someone other's nip. Hopefully these are version 1.0 bugs that ass be fixed quickly.

If only for its snap boast, Twitter for Windows 8 is worth using, because the app handles this sport better than alternative clients such as MetroTwit and Rovi. Unfortunately, the app is missing some underlying functionality constitute connected the iPad edition, and it's a little rocky on the constancy front. At long last, it's still non the official Twitter app we've been dreaming about, but it's a solid start—and IT gives the Microsoft Store a crucial, big-name intersection it's been absent for nigh five months.