The Twitter Progressive Web App (PWA) updated today and as a result the Windows 10 Mobile and PC apps have now gained several new features and improvements.
Most notable with this update is its strong focus on improving Twitter Events with a new floating video player and a live count of how many people are currently engaged. Twitter Events can be viewed by tapping the Search icon within the Twitter app but the feature, in general, isn’t really used very much so most users won’t see much beyond the trending topics on that pane most of the time.
Other changes with this update include new crop functionality for images, improvements to the appearance of polls, an upgrade of the emoji to Twemoji 11.3, and a larger media carousel on user profiles.
Here’s the full release notes for this update:
New
- Video: Events with a video will now pop-out the video and put it in the bottom corner of the screen as you scroll down to read tweets.
- Events: Added social context (‘8k people here’) to the events page to share the scale of the event.
- Image Uploading: You can now resize and crop uploaded images for your Tweets and DMs. Click the paintbrush icon on the bottom right after selecting an image to adjust the image (Profile image cropping is coming soon™).
Updated
- Polls: Improvements to poll display and poll creation on smaller screens.
- Emoji: Update emoji to Twemoji 11.3. Good visual coverage of the changes at Emojipedia and more specific details at GitHub
- Profile: Allow media carousel to scroll through more items. It was set to 6, increased to 20.
- Profile (mobile only, for now): When viewing an account’s Tweets, Likes, or Media we’ll show the total count. It appears under the account name in the header, and changes appropriately as you navigate the profile.
- Images: Slightly improved image quality for large images.
- Timeline: Scroll positioning now accurately accounts for the size of the top-navigation component.
- Accessibility: Improved the screen readability of the composer to at the top of the timeline.
- Direct Messages: Make the entire conversation a drag/drop target, rather than just the input component.
Fixed
- Profile: Profile photos are no longer slightly cropped.
- Timeline: The ‘retweeted by’ text is now properly aligned.
- Tweets: Tweet gif attachments were incorrectly limited to 5MB, we’ve increased the limit to 15MB.
- Video: Fixed an issue when rotating a device while playing a full-screen video.
- Video: Allow Firefox to autoplay videos too.
- Timeline: Fixed a scroll position bug cause by a change in Chrome’s full-screen behavior.
- Direct Messages: Images in DMs will always be full size (as opposed to the cropped display the timeline uses)
The Twitter PWA is essentially the source code for the Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 Twitter apps, mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for KaiOS, and the Twitter Lite app on Android devices. This type of app is gaining in popularity as it allows developers to update apps on multiple ecosystems at the same time as opposed to managing individual apps which can take up more time and resources.
Do you use the Twitter app on your Windows 10 device or do you prefer to use the website? Let us know in the comments below and then follow us on Twitter for more app news.
