AppleInsider Staff
In an update rolled out on Monday, Twitter brought a few substantial changes to its service, including direct message syncing across iOS, Mac and Android, as well as a more powerful mobile search tool.
The "coordinated update," as Twitter called it in a post to its official blog, allows Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com and TweetDeck users to sync DMs across all device and accounts.
For example, when a DM is opened in the official Twitter app or supported client, the message will be marked as read on all other devices.
As for search results, iPhone, iPad, Android and mobile.twitter.com will be improved to include expanded user bios, making it easier to find accounts queried. In addition to the enhanced results page, users can swipe left to find similar accounts. For example, if a user looks up "MLB," suggestion will appear for ESPN, Ken Rosenthal, and other related accounts.
iPhone-specific upgrades include a built-in reply composer that pops up when users tap on a tweet's details. Also, a new "people button" is now present in the navigation bar which, when selected, shows "interesting or relevant" accounts users may want to follow. This feature was already present in Twitter's Android app.
Finally, Twitter for Mac now includes a Connect tab, which holds retweets, mentions and favorited tweets. The app also supports six new languages in Danish, Filipino, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai.
According to Twitter, the rollout will be gradual and users need to download the latest apps in order to take advantage of the features.
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
3 Comments
Strange that it didn't sync across iOS devices before.
Hey there... question for you folks. I updated the Mac app to 2.3.0 and now the notifications are back to going through Growl instead of Notification Center. Why is that? I was happier having the Twitter notifications going through Notification Center but now there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. The preferences only seem to allow for all notifications to go through growl. Am I missing an option to direct them to Notification Center? Thanks, A
[quote name="PhilBoogie" url="/t/158397/twitter-gets-cross-platform-direct-message-syncing-and-enhanced-mobile-search-in-update#post_2359245"]Strange that it didn't sync across iOS devices before.[/quote] This is a reflection of software industry today. Not only did syncing not work, various functions did not (still do not) work the same way on their iOS app, in the browser and on the desktop.