MetroTwit – A Desktop Alternative To Tweetdeck?

Posted on July 5, 2011


MetroTwit is inspired by the Metro tiles UI found on the Windows Phone 7 mobile platform. It’s aimed to be a minimal and lightweight Twitter desktop client for Windows. It’s in beta phase and can be found to download and use for those on Windows. Keep in mind you will need .NET installed on your machine. I gave it a try for a few days. This is what I found.

It is very smooth and slick, it has a clean and minimal look and feels very much like WP7. There is a choice of a light and dark theme, with the ability to choose any colour for the accents. As I’m an avid Tweetdeck user I went with the dark theme with some red accents.

Drawing inspiration from Microsoft’s Metro design language, MetroTwit celebrates an elegant and clean user interface that’s beautiful to look at and a pleasure to read.

MetroTwit shares some great features along with Tweetdeck:

  • The ability to add custom searches as columns. This includes hash tags and / or users.
  • Just like Tweetdeck’ deck.ly it supports tweets which are longer than 140 characters using TwitLonger.
  • Ability to preview media inline just like Tweetdeck, services like Youtube, Twitpic and Yfrog are supported. Whilst also supporting url shortening.
  • Notifications can be set to appear in specific places around the screen, although I’ve yet to make it function properly.

There are features which MetroTwit has over Tweetdeck:

  • Auto complete usernames. Tweetdeck lacks this essential feature. MetroTwit does this in a very slick interface.
  • Unlike on Tweetdeck you can rearrange your custom columns easily and have them in specific widths. Great ability to have columns exactly how you want them.
  • The vector graphics used in MetroTwit make it look smooth and slick in any size. It’s great eye candy in any resolution.
MetroTwit is a really well made desktop client for an alternative to Tweetdeck. It has the same features as Tweetdeck, whilst including many more over it. Whilst MetroTwit is a really nice client and works well. It is limited by a few factors. Running on .NET not only restricts it to Windows, but it also uses up more RAM than Tweetdeck, which runs on Adobe’s AIR platform and is lighter on the resources.
Keeping in mind it is still in beta phase and there are more improvements and functionality coming for it. It has the potential to be a great alternative to Tweetdeck, which currently dominates the desktop Twitter client.
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