Twitter has been focusing a lot of its development efforts on the Progressive Web App (PWA), which became the official app for Windows 10 almost a year ago. The latest round of updates brings a few improvements to the table that should make the experience a little better.
There"s only one truly new addition today, and that"s a new emoji picker for Direct Messages (DMs). This is only available on widescreen devices, meaning it"ll be most useful for the Windows 10 app, but it allows you to bring up an emoji picker within the app, rather than using the native Windows 10 keyboard. It"s not a major change, but it could be more convenient for some.
The team has also made some changes to existing parts of the app, such as the image cropper, which will now behave more naturally when zooming in and out of a picture. The app will also be smarter about what images are shown in the timeline based on the pixel density of your device"s screen. Lastly, screen readers will now be able to properly identify the emoji picket button by saying "Add emoji", rather than just saying "button".
To round out the updates, there"s been some fixes to some issues throughout the app. This includes improved Twitter sharing via DMs, improved stability and more:
- Internationalization: Fixed the ordering of social proof phrases (e.g. “@Twitter Retweeted”) in languages that read right to left.
- Stability: Adjusted the app reload logic to prevent the infinite reloads that some people were experiencing.
- Scrolling: A bug snuck in that allowed pull-to-refresh to work in places that it shouldn’t have. Pull-to-refresh is again properly contained.
- Direct Messages: When sharing a tweet through DMs we weren’t auto-focusing the message text box, which made adding a message require some clicking. Focus should be automatic now.
The Twitter PWA, which is essentially the mobile version of its website, is slated to become the default experience, even on desktop devices. As the company makes improvements to the app, it should become a better replacement for the desktop UI, which will likely be phased out over time.