Every few weeks, Twitter rounds up the latest changes it"s made to the web experience on its platform, and thus, the progressive web app (PWA) on platforms like Windows 10. The social network had another round of updates to share to close out March, and it includes some notable changes, though not everything is completely new.
One of the big things that was recently added was support for Fleets, Twitter"s take on Stories from platforms like Snapchat, which can now be viewed in direct messages (DMs). Fleets were announced last year, and support for them on the Twitter PWA was initially rolled out to select users about a month ago, but the rollout is now complete. However, it"s worth noting that you can still only view Fleets shared in DMs, and there isn"t a Fleets section at the top of your feed as you"d see on the mobile apps.
Another notable change made in the past few weeks is that when you try to retweet a news article, Twitter will show a message asking you to read the article first. Twitter has been trying to get users to be more thoughtful with retweets for some time. Leading up to the United States" presidential election last year, it automatically showed the tweet composer when attempting to share another tweet, in addition to labeling potentially misinformed tweets. This time, the change is only meant to encourage users to read beyond the title of an article and it shouldn"t interrupt the flow of the retweeting experience.
The last of the bigger additions pertain to Topics. First off, there"s a new page where you can browse and pick topics to follow. You can access it via the More button on the side menu, or use this link to access it directly. Twitter is also testing showing suggested Topics to follow in a side bar on widescreen displays.
Otherwise, Twitter has updated its website with a wide range of improvements. These include improved accessibility, updated emoji, and more:
- Accessibility: Voiceover will now read out labels for government and state-affiliated media when focusing a Tweet that includes these labels.
- Accessibility: Improved focus navigation and voiceover when navigating into a Tweet within a conversation.
- Accessibility: Corrected accessibility markup on Buttons that act as links to other pages, or reposition you on the current page.
- Account: Improved readability of error messages on the account login page.
- DM: Improved dynamic display for larger numbers of avatars in the DM conversation information section for group conversations.
- Emoji: Updated emoji to Twemoji 13.0.2. Visual coverage of the changes can be found at Emojipedia, and more specific information can be found at GitHub.
- Lists: Added screen name to the add/remove from Lists menu action for additional context.
- Notifications: Increased the number of avatars that are shown for condensed notifications on the notification screen.
- Nudges: Improved the look and feel of article nudges shown at various screen sizes when Retweeting a Tweet with a link to an article.
And of course, there"s also an array of fixes to multiple aspects of the experience. Here"s the full list:
- Bookmarks: The floating compose button will now show properly on the Bookmarks screen on mobile clients.
- Composer: The cursor will now start at the beginning when auto populating the composer with a hashtag from an Event or other source.
- Composer: Opening scheduled or drafted Tweets from the inline composer will no longer display an empty composer modal.
- DM Drawer: The popover menus that are displayed for DM messages will no longer scroll with the body of the page when using the DM Drawer.
- DMs: Fixed an issue where the DM muted accounts timeline would show as empty after navigating away and back.
- DMs: When sending media through DMs, the composer will no longer incorrectly clear, and will become disabled until the media has actually sent.
- Events: Fixed issues with cropping on Event header images.
- Lists: The Lists menu item will no longer disappear at smaller screen heights.
- Lists: Corrected an issue where clicking on Followers on the List screen was showing an error screen.
- Lists: Fixed an issue where rapid presses of the next button when creating a List would create duplicates.
- Profile: We will no longer show the location icon if the location is empty.
- Scrollbars: Updated a number of places where scrollbars were being shown when they shouldn’t have been.
- Topics: Fixed an issue where clicking on Topics in the carousel was not requesting new items as needed.
- Topics: Unfollowing a Topic from within the home timeline will now correctly show a confirmation prompt.
- Tweets: You will no longer be able to trigger the modal for blocking via keyboard shortcut on your own Tweets.
- Tweets: We will now show the properly localized timezone on the Schedule Tweet page.
As usual, this is a roundup of updates that have been made over the past month, so they may have been available to you for a while, while some might not be there just yet. It shouldn"t take long for them to be fully available, however.