My Week With MetroTwit

Over the past week I have been (attempting) to use MetroTwit as my main access point for Twitter as part of my ongoing experiment to discover the best Twitter client. Here are my thoughts in MetroTwit.

Pros:

• Aesthetics are amazing. I really like the implementation of the Metro style interface, and the developers have done a really good job making it consistent throughout the entire app.
• Smooth and fluid animations, that adds further to the pleasing aesthetics.
• A much easier way to find profiles of your friends, and view your own statistics.
• A wide range of preferences that are presented in a clearly categorised layout that is very user friendly
• At the press of one button you can view the current Top Trends.

Cons:

• It cannot be resized to a thin column. After using DestroyTwitter 2 for a week this was a huge hole in the feature base that led to me using the app far less frequently. However, this did end up in me running the app in a two column view with my feed on the left and my @mentions on the right – this led to me being much more aware of what was going on in all categories of the network. So this can be seen as a pro and a con, but I would – ideally – like the feature to be there for the people that want it.
• The free version had ads, this is just a niggle – I understand how ads are there to support the company that is developing the app – but when there are alternatives available that don’t include ads I am attracted to them more because of this.
• It notifies you of old @mentions every time that you start the application, instead of just showing the news ones, if any. While this only lasts a few seconds – it does become annoying after a while.

After just a few days using MetroTwit it became clear that it was clearly a better option when it came to viewing profiles and other things like that. However, I found it much harder to use on a day to day basis. This was mainly due to the fact that I couldn’t have it in a thin column on the side of my screen. This resulted in me often going to twitter.com to catch up on what was going on – I know this is against ‘the rules’ but, heck, I couldn’t help it.

All in all, this is a great client – but only if you are very used to using Twitter clients all of the time. It does look nice, and there are features that it boasts that lasts weeks client (DestroyTwitter) did not have. However, due to the lack of integration that the application offered me, I have to say that of the two clients I have used so far – DestroyTwitter 2 was far more impressive.

Over the next week I will be using TweetDeck to see if it can improve on either of the clients I have seen so far.

May I just apologize for the short article this week, haven’t got a load of spare time with it being Mothers Day and all that, but I will provide a more in depth conclusion in my summary article in two weeks time.

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