Twitter rolled-out a pretty major new feature to its Windows 10 app yesterday with the new tabs functionality but there was also a surprising number of smaller, yet no less substantial, changes made to the popular social app. Here are all of the other new and changed features in the Windows 10 Twitter app both announced by Twitter itself and discovered by ourselves.
- New Windows: Similar to how opening a new tab or window in Edge works, the Twitter app now allows users to open up a new tab or, if they wish, an entirely new window. This can be useful for those that manage different accounts or who simply want more space within the app that’s not clogged up by the new tabs menu bar.
- Built-In Emoji/Emoticons: Windows 10 users will no longer have to pull up the touch-based keyboard to insert emoticons into their tweets. A new emoji option has been added to the compose tweet window next to the existing camera, gif, and poll options.
- Support for Pinned Tweets: Pinned tweets now show up when viewing a user’s profile page within the Twitter app. The option to convert a regular tweet into a pinned tweet has also been added. (Note: This refers to pinned tweets within Twitter itself, not pinned tweets on the Windows 10 Start Menu/Screen)
- Reply Counts: A small change but an interesting one. A small number now appears under a tweet, indicating how many replies it has.
- Support for Protected Accounts: Those who like to restrict access to their accounts can now approve or deny follow requests.
- Rich Content in DMs: Now users can slide into their DMs and experience more rich media instead of basic URL links.
- Account-Free Browsing: The app now gives more access to users when they’re not logged in or don’t have an account.
- It’s Faster: The Windows 10 Twitter app now loads content much faster. This is particularly noticeable when searching for gifs when composing a tweet.
- Finally, Cleaner Profiles: Similar to the web experience, reply tweets no longer appear on a user’s Twitter profile. Unlike the web experience though, which features an option to view posts and replies on a profile, the Windows 10 app appears to have forgotten to add this feature and now makes it pretty much impossible to spy on a user’s conversations with other people.
Despite the size of this update, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows as the update has also made pasting text into tweets with the keyboard CTRL+V shortcut unreliable (now seems to work only half of the time) and the app continues to crash as much as it did before (stability is still an issue). There has also been little development in regards to Twitter Lists which is arguably the feature that really puts the Windows 10 app behind its iOS and Android counterparts.
Let us know what you think. Are you happy with this update? Is there anything that you think is missing? Are there features that you like or don’t like? Share your thoughts with the community in the comments below.
