16 December 2013

Twitter Blogs: “Photos in direct messages and swipe between timelines”

iPhone Twitter client with new account switcher

Swipe to discover what’s happening

Now you can swipe from your Home timeline to the Discover timeline to find trends, popular Tweets and new accounts tailored for you, and then swipe to your Activity timeline to see Tweets and accounts that are popular among people you follow.

Jeremy Gordon

Even if it’s not mentioned in the announcement, the app also has a ‘Photos’ timeline, which is curiously available only for one of my accounts. I can only hope that at some point in the future users will be able to customize timelines to add anything they want to check frequently, for example lists or search results, effectively making the mobile app the equivalent of TweetDeck on desktop, since apparently Twitter has no interest to maintain a mobile TweetDeck app. It would also be nice to see tweets from multiple accounts in separate timelines, skipping the account switcher entirely. Granted, users with multiple accounts are probably a small minority, but they are also the most active users who keep the stream of tweets flowing.

Speaking of account switching, it was also improved in this latest update with gestures and iOS 7-inspired animations: if until now you had to click a button to open the account list, now you can bring it up by swiping top to bottom on the ‘Me’ tab, until the profile picture pops back up and the other profile shows up underneath. Very cool and convenient! Or, as I later discovered, you can long-press the ‘Me’ tab to invoke the same screen.

Update: Unfortunately the new version also removed one useful gestures from the app, swiping over a tweet to reveal more options, for example dismissing promoted tweets. This has now been replaced with a more conventional gesture, tap-and-hold will open an extra menu for the less frequent tweet actions, including dismissing.

Post a Comment