Windows Metro UI Mixed In with Twitter

good
key review info
application features
  • Tweet a thousand words, or just an extra few
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Among the many solutions for managing your tweetstreams, the recently acquired TweetDeck is one of the most favored by users, but not the best looking. A more eye-candy client is MetroTwit, an application born from mixing together Windows’ Metro UI and Twitter’s service.

Microsoft’s sleek and modern Metro UI captured the attention of journalists all over the world because they pushed typography design to reach the highest functionality standards without neglecting good looks.

Taking advantage of Microsoft .NET 4.0 and Windows Presententation Foundation 4 and inspired by the Metro UI design, MetroTwit aims at celebrating simplicity in its purest form giving you only the necessary options to handle your Twitter account in the easiest manner.

The simple layout leaves no room for confusion. Information columns are automatically resized according to the interface’s limits as they are being added or removed or when the application window is resized; you can organize them in whatever order you want by simply dragging them to a new position.

By default you get to see your friends’ tweets, mentions and the direct messages, but MetroTwit has room for the public timeline, your retweets or your favorite tweets. Although there is plenty of room in the application to show all the columns, enabling too many of them will make the space a bit crowded.

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Messages are typed in the lower part of the screen, where also reside the main controls of the app. Although still in incipient stage of development (0.8.0.2 beta) MetroTwit supports spell-checking so fast typers have slimmer chances of sending words with mixed up letters.

As far as media support is concerned, the app can link to yfrog or twitpic to send your images. As soon as you drop an image into the message space of the interface you’ll be able to add a caption text as well as your tweet.

The knobs in the lower part of the screen let you search for a user profile, search Twitter for keywords, refresh all the columns at once or view the lists in your Twitter account; you can also create lists and lock them with the “private” attribute so that they are not publicly available.

The columns themselves come with their own set of options that let you pause receiving updates, refresh it or remove it (there is also the “x” button with the same functionality). Resizing a column can be easily done by dragging by the edges.

Longer tweets seem to become more popular and going over the 140-character limit requires a service capable to show the entire post. TweetDeck uses its own service, Deck.ly, for the job. MetroTwit appeals to TwitLonger to get around the limitation; thus, if the post limit is exceeded, after you click to send the message you will be asked if TwitLonger (the only choice available for this kind of service) should take the extra load.

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Configuring MetroTwit is not a tough task, with options allowing you to choose a different color or accent for the theme as well as to enable spell-check or setting up sounds and which alerts should be shown and customizing their lifespan and position on the desktop screen.

However, besides these there is also the possibility to define the refresh rate for displaying the messages. URL shortening is essential for your tweets so MetroTwit puts at your disposal services from bitly which offer metrics for the messages: bit.ly and j.mp; viewing the long URL can be done by enabling one of the three services supported: LongURL Please, LongURL or untiny.me. For image uploads you can pick between yfrog and twitpic and location services available come from Google and Bing.

MetroTwit brings in a simple, fresh and extremely elegant design, but for many users functionality comes first. During our tests we bumped into a few snags, the most important being the fact that waiting for the trends column to load up was a true patience test; we failed and after a couple of minutes we shifted our attention to other parts of the application.

As MetroTwit celebrates simplicity, it’s no tool for professional usage; a pro can use image uploading, spell-checking and long tweeting services, there is also a need for scheduling message posting or support for multiple accounts. But despite lacking some useful features and being in beta stage, MetroTwit is an awesome-looking solution to receive your tweetstream.

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The Good

The most impressive feature in MetroTwit is its design; a simple layout and self-resizing columns help you get a better view of the tweets as you resize the interface.

Spell-checking, automatic image upload to photo serving services and support for long-tweet solutions are also included in the deal.

Autocompleting the name of the user when sending messages is a very cool feature that helps you post the tweet faster.

The Bad

We had no luck viewing what was trending on Twitter from MetroTwit and RAM usage may be too much for some users; during our testing values went as high as 115MB and CPU twitched around 22% when refreshing the columns.

The Truth

MetroTwit has not yet reached a final stage of development and still has a long road ahead. Its success relies mostly on the appeal of the users to the interface, which is awesome, and less on functionality.

It has great potential to reach the regular user as everything is pretty straightforward and configuration does not require any effort to complete. But the professional Twitter user will discard it for something a tad more complicated.

NOTE: MetroTwit is still in beta stage of development and being work in progress we automatically award it with the default three-star rating.

user interface 3
features 3
ease of use 3
pricing / value 3


final rating 3
Editor's review
good