Twitter has been making a lot of moves lately with regards to official clients. The Android and iOS apps have been updated to better reflect the company’s vision of having consistent user experience after it updated the mobile website across all platforms to work and look the same way. Its latest change was pushed out yesterday when it updated TweetDeck on all desktop platforms.
TweetDeck on Mac, Windows, Chrome and web, but not the iPad, have been updated with a slightly new look that includes dark/light themes, a larger profile display, better identifications of tweets in the Interactions tab, as well as being able to adjust column widths and font sizes. TweetDeck now also supports the retina display MacBook Pro with high resolution images and text.
Earlier this year Twitter announced that it strives to deliver a consistent user experience across its properties but at that time, everything about Twitter had been anything but consistent. Granted, it has more than a handful of apps and sites to deal with, not to mention having to make sure that the network remains trouble free, and a limited amount of resources to handle all of it.
The changes to TweetDeck aren’t as dramatic as the changes made to the Twitter iPad app, which was essentially rebuilt from the ground up. The iPad app had a complete overhaul that threw away the old app in place of the new interface. TweetDeck’s changes are more evolutionary but still significant enough that users will notice the difference.
Unfortunately keyboard shortcuts are still not part of the update to TweetDeck even though Twitter.com has had keyboard shortcuts for some time now. The requirement to use the mouse pointer to perform actions in TweetDeck can be a bit of an issue when keyboard commands can be more convenient and practical.
To be able to watch YouTube videos directly on the Mac version of TweetDeck requires having Flash player installed instead of fetching the HTML5 version, so that’s another bit of inconvenience.
What’s nice about this update though is that the Interactions tab clearly shows whether an update is a reply, a favorite, a retweet, or a follow by displaying distinct icons within the updates. a red @ for a reply, Twitter’s blue bird for a follow, a green icon for a retweet, and a yellow star when somebody favorites your tweet. Oh, and the app no longer shows multiple retweets individually in the timeline column which is great news for those who don’t like to have their timeline filled with retweets that can drown other tweets. Multiple retweets still show on the Interactions column.
Lists are also more prominently accessible by having its icon placed on the top left side of the header and you can directly create, edit, and generally manage your Twitter lists from within the app. User profile has been updated to display the header image. While the profile display tells you whether the account follows you, it doesn’t apply to all your signed in accounts. It only shows the follow relationship to your default account, which can be set from Settings.
You can start using the new TweetDeck by going to the website, using the Chrome app, or downloading the Mac or Windows apps. TweetDeck for iPhone, Android, and iPad have yet to receive the new update.