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TweetDeck 1.3 review: better, but not quite there yet

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In December, the newly Twitter-owned TweetDeck client was thrust upon us, charmlessly sweeping away the old suite’s power and flexibility. It was such a backwards step that more than three months later, I’m still using the unsupported existing client.

This week, TweetDeck was updated to version 1.3, with the developers saying they’ve listened to feedback and made some much-needed improvements. While that may be true, when you start again from near zero as they have, it’s difficult to get back to where things were in a few months.

List management

You can now create lists from within the app, and every user now has an “Add or remove from lists” option on their profile. The lists themselves work fine, but the creation process is unnecessarily arduous. You have two options. If you spot a tweet from a user, you can use the “Add” option on their profile. But if you want to manually make a list in the first place, here’s the creation screen:

tw_list

There are no easy check boxes next to the whole list of all the people you follow, as in old TweetDeck, and to find a user you have to know the exact username – there’s no autocomplete in the search box to help. Try making a list completely off the top of your head and you’ll probably give up after three or four, as I did.

Activity and Interactions

The Interactions column is a neat idea. It’s basically a Mentions column, but also informs you when people follow you or add you to a list, and when they favourite or RT your tweets. It rapidly becomes addictive, enhancing an existing feature – exactly what we’re used to TweetDeck doing.

tw_tweetdeck

There is one issue with naming it Interactions, though: while it includes all of those useful alerts, it doesn’t include your own tweets, so if you’re having one of its eponymous Interactions it looks disturbingly like a one-way “conversation” from a stalker. A minor thing to fix.

Activity is a similar concept, but takes it further. It’s shows you who the people you follow are following, favouriting and adding to lists. It’s a neat idea that helps you find new people to follow, although it can be a bit overwhelming.

Media previews

Attached photos and videos now appear in a thumbnail within their parent tweet, and can be expanded into an almost-full-screen preview window. A neat, much-needed step, and one area where the new client improves on the old one.

tw_media

Edit and RT

Previously, the RT button only gave a “quote tweet” option, which is far less useful in most cases than a straightforward “RT @…” one. The developers heard the complaints and fixed it. Quite a few other niggles from the last time I tested the client have also been fixed, presumably in earlier updates – you can set a default account, for example.

Verdict

The media previews are neat and there’s promise in the Activity and Interactions columns, so I’m cautiously optimistic that TweetDeck is heading in the right direction. It’s actually approaching usability for me. But I’d be far happier if the developers had taken the first three months after launch to focus on fixing what was broken rather than creating new features.

Where’s the customisation of notification styles and positions? Why do columns that won’t entirely fit in the window vanish to a second page of columns when a scrollbar worked perfectly well? Why does composing a tweet still steal the focus of the whole application? And the same goes for viewing a profile, for that matter. For power users the current system is vastly inferior to being able to simultaneously view a profile in one column, read my feed in another and compose a tweet at the top of the window. That’s how I use TweetDeck, which is why this suite is still not going to beat the old client in my eyes.

Twitter, fix those core issues to complement your improvements and I reckon you’ll have me.


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