First Look: MetroTwit Beta

Published July 14, 2010 | By Mike Crassweller

Twitter clients are a dime a dozen these days. Mobile, Windows, Mac, every platform has at least a dozen different Twitter applications available to download and use. Given the breadth of choices, and the relatively limited set of potential features, new Twitter clients have to differentiate themselves in areas such as look & feel, or creative uses of additional services to enrich the Twitter experience. Today we’re going to look at an upcoming Twitter client designed solely for Microsoft Windows: MetroTwit

My MetroTwit, with two custom search columns

Inspired UI

MetroTwit will look familiar if you’ve been following the ongoing development of the Windows Phone 7/Zune platform. MetroTwit takes its style directly from Microsoft’s Metro design that is becoming the standard for Microsoft’s mobile devices. To my knowledge, this is one of the first desktop apps to really embrace the new mobile visual design. The result is a very clean UI that does an excellent job of highlighting special content you might be interested in (links, hashtags, usernames etc).

Streamlined, spartan (but still useful) UI is the name of the game for MetroTwit, and this extends to every aspect of the app. When new tweets come in, a notification window fades in showing a summary of what’s new that quickly fades away, keeping out of your way if you’re not interested.

Infinite Scrolling

Probably the most interesting feature in MetroTwit is Infinite Scrolling. Most Twitter clients will store up to a set number of tweets in each column before rotating them out as new ones come in. Typically, this number is around 100 per column. This is likely to reduce memory usage and not have to worry about having to show an enormous number of messages. However, sometimes you want to go back more than 100 messages (i.e. catching up on overnight activity when you get up in the morning). MetroTwit resolves this by loading in 20 messages per column at a time, and as you scroll down, loads additional messages.

From what I’ve tried so far, there’s no hard limit to how far you can go back aside from the hourly API call limit imposed by Twitter itself.

Windows-Only, Ever.

MetroTwit not only takes UI cues from Microsoft’s bleeding edge technology, it’s built on it too. MetroTwit makes use of Microsoft .NET 4.0 and Windows Presentation 4 and the result is a pretty light-weight application that looks pretty sharp.

Promising

MetroTwit only entered technical beta at the end of May, 2010 and is currently at version 0.2.0.0, so it’s a very very early beta prone to crashes and odd hangs. Despite that however, it’s already a solid option for Windows users. Can MetroTwit unseat popular clients like TweetDeck on Windows? Maybe not just yet, but it’s only been available in early beta form for less than two months. Of all of the Windows Twitter apps I’ve tried in the last year, this one seems to have the most promise. If you’re a WIndows Vista or 7 user and have .NET 4.0 installed, this is definitely a Twitter client worth checking out.

Download: MetroTwit

[Correction note: MetroTwit works just fine on Windows XP. Thanks to Raphael Rivera for the correction]

Posted in Windows | Tagged beta, Twitter, zune