Twitter (PWA) gets mobile-first UI revamp, topic following, DM quality filter

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Last covered here back in August, Twitter keeps on improving its Twitter PWA, most easily accessed on Windows 10 Mobile through the official UWP Store application, even if the code changes are all server-side. Still, Twitter gets smoother and more functional week by week - it's the flagship social network for W10M these days, I'd argue. Here's what's new, updated and fixed, thanks to Twitter getting round to documenting what they've been up to since the summer!

From the official release notes:

New

  • Explore more: We’ve added tabs to the explore tab to help organize all the content that lives there. Where available, you can use these to check out a variety of categories like news, sports, and more

  • DM Quality Filter: If you have the “Allow DMs from anyone” setting enabled, some message requests may now be filtered out and hidden at the very bottom of the requests inbox.

  • Search DM Inbox: To help you find conversations more quickly, you can type the name of a user or group into your DM inbox and matching conversations will be shown. This only searches your most recent messages, so if you have a lot results may not appear.

  • Bottom Navigation (Mobile): On mobile devices, the navigation bar has been moved to the bottom of the page.

  • Saved Searches: Crafted the perfect search to find out what’s happening on Twitter? Well now you can save it and quickly search it again. Use the menu next to the search box to “Save search”, and then find all your saved searches inside the search box when it’s empty.

  • Topics: You can now follow Topics on Twitter. Stay up to date with ideas, teams, hobbies and more by following a topic form certain Tweets or searches.

  • Score Cards: Is your favorite team playing? Catch up on the box score with Twitter. In Explore and live event pages, you may now see scorecards from leagues around the world.

  • Translate Profile Bios: In addition to Tweets, if we detect that a user’s bio is in another language, you may now see an option to translate it inline.

Updated

  • Navigation: Added icons to menus, for beauty.

  • Settings: You no longer need to enter a phone number to use certain 2-factor authentication devices.

  • Settings: Added an “extra small” choice to the font size selector under display settings.

  • Media Viewer: Updated the media viewer to use more of the screen on large devices. Improved various uses around the site to make them more consistent.

  • Timelines: Added avatars to the new Tweets pill to provide more information about who recently tweeted.

  • Broadcasts: Improved the page for watching live broadcasts to be more consistent with the rest of the site.

All good stuff and, in this case, implemented with no need to even head into the Microsoft Store to update the UWP app.

Here's the new version of Twitter in action on my Lumia 950 XL:

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The tabbed Explore pane, note the tabs along the top; (right) note the 'Quality filter' on DMs from people you don't follow.

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Finding a person or topic quickly in your DMs; (right) the whole interface is now mobile-friendly in that the main controls (home, explore, mentions, DMs) are down the bottom of the screen/UI.

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Topics are a new idea, i.e. subjects you're interested in will show up in your Twitter timeline, not just content from people you follow. You can start setting this up in this wizard, to be found by scrolling down in your Explore/For you tab. Here I'm following guitar-related items.

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The topics are a bit thin on the ground at the moment, but it's a start. For example, in the whole world of 'rock music' there are only eight topics! Early days; (right) note the addition of icons to each hamburger menu item, Twitter's PWA looks that bit more 'professional' now, I think.

No, there's still no DM 'push', and I'm not sure this will ever be possible under Windows 10 Mobile. But hey, once you're in the PWA it's becoming a fuller and fuller Twitter experience. 

You can grab or update the Twitter PWA-ified UWP client here in the Store

Enjoy the mode toggling, enjoy night mode, enjoy the 280 character compatibility and tweetstorm feature, enjoy the layout, text size options, and explore functionality, this application now trumps third party options like Tweetium UWP because of recent Twitter changes which knocked push notifications on the head.

PS. See also my general round-up of ways to access Twitter under Windows 10 Mobile.