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Twitter for Windows 8 released, brings Snap view, Share charm and more

Twitter for Windows 8 released, brings Snap view, Share charm and more

By KS Sandhya Iyer | Updated: 14 March 2013 10:47 IST

Twitter has finally been released for Windows 8 and Windows RT devices and users can immediately head over to the Windows Store to download the native app.

Mike Kruzeniski, Design Lead at Twitter took to the official company blog to make the announcement and shared that besides the standard Home, Connect, Discover and Me tabs, Twitter for Windows 8 is offering an array of additional new features as well.

"Twitter for Windows 8 brings you all the design, features and functionality of Twitter combined with the fast and fluid technology of Windows 8," Twitter says in its app description.

Snap View, as the name suggests, lets users adjust the size of the Twitter app to one-third, two-thirds or full screen and use other apps alongside it. Users will be able to track conversations on Twitter while watching a separate video stream or read a news story.

Photos can also be expanded or shown in a photo gallery. Users can choose to view larger versions of individual photos in a landscape mode and also tap them to view in full screen. Photo galleries from favourite users are also accessible.

There are two new 'charms' as Twitter calls it namely Share and Search, which let users tweet or search from any app. "Simply swipe from the right edge of Windows 8 and then choose the Share charm to share content from any app, such as a photo or news article, to Twitter", the blog highlights.

And, finally, true to the Windows 8 interface, Twitter adds Live Tiles and notifications that are on-view no matter which app is running.

It's noteworthy that despite having apps for most major platforms, Twitter has never been present on Windows for PC. The microblogging site announced it was working on a native Windows 8 app back in October but post that, we never heard from them until now.

Over the past one year, Twitter has been trying to offer consistency across its many platforms such as the iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Web, OS X and even Windows Phone.

Last month, Twitter rolled out a much needed update for its native Windows Phone app, bringing a new user interface, support for live tiles and lock screen notifications to it. Following the update, the app's new look is now more in line with Twitter's native apps on other mobile OS platforms including iOS and Android.

The update brings the new Twitter user interface including the Home, Connect, Discover and Me tabs (without the text labels), to the app. Users can switch between tabs by simply swiping across them, just like the previous version, so there are no swipe gestures.

However, the update adds omnipresent buttons for composing tweets and for search, and the 'pull to refresh' gesture for refreshing the timeline. The Discover tab features Trending topics, who to follow, and category listing for users. The app retains the multiple accounts but get rids of the dark theme. It also offers autocomplete suggestions for twitter users when you start typing a handle name after keying-in the '@' symbol while composing a tweet.

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