It"s been some time since Twitter last shared the updates it"s made to its Progressive Web App, specifically since the social network turned the new experience into the default Twitter website for everyone. That doesn"t mean development hasn"t been moving forward, and now, the team has highlighted more of the recent changes to the Twitter PWA.
As usual, the updates include some new features, some updated functionality, and some fixes. As far as what"s new, the Twitter PWA can now translate profile bios in addition to tweets, and if you perform a search that might come in handy later, you can now save your searches. There are also new Topics users can follow to stay on top of the latest news, a feature that was announced separately last week.
- 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.
Some existing features have also received improvements over the past few months. Menus have more icons now, the media viewer has been improved for larger screens, and more:
- 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.
Finally, there are some fixes to various parts of the website, addressing performance and other issues:
- Navigation: Improve overall performance when opening and closing modals
- Navigation: Improved alignment of text in various headers and modules for right to left languages.
- Composer: Fixed a few bugs with CJK language composition.
- Composer: Improved performance for some slower machines so typing should feel more responsive.
- Performance: Reduced some flickering when re-visiting a page you’ve previously seen or that has some content you’ve encountered before.
- DMs: Improve sharing content to DM Groups that already exist.
These new features may be rolling out gradually, as some of them don"t seem to be live for us just yet. Others may already have been available for some time. Either way, the improvements should be welcome for anyone using the service.