Rowi is releasing their new version today – bringing 2.0 to Windows Phone handsets. There are a lot of new features since the last revision many months ago and Rowi fans should be excited.
Setting the Stage
I have an affinity for Twitter applications. In fact, on my Nokia Lumia 800 (and on my Mac too), I have about 4-6 Twitter apps installed depending on the week.
Back in February, I wrote that Carbon “Stole The Show” with regards to Windows Phone Witter clients. Well, since Carbon has come out, I’ve been paying attention to the competition.
I really liked Rowi for Windows Phone, but the scrolling was just too slow in the application. It lagged my finger by just enough to be really annoying. However, some changes are afoot in Rowi.
Enter Rowi 2.0
Since a few weeks ago, I’ve been running a new 2.0 release candidate version of Rowi and I’m really impressed. The scrolling speeds are much faster, the application seems much zippier, and a few new features set this app apart amongst the competition.
First of all, the new context menu that pops up when you tap a Tweet unlocks key actions with one easy action. The screenshot to the right shows this functionality.
Additionally, I really like the photo previews in the timeline and the preference to load entire conversations when you load a tweet that is an @ reply to someone else. (yes, I admit, these might be small things, but to me, they are huge little awesome bits.)
Web pages load quickly and look fantastic with the Readability functionality when you load a link.
Special Pricing Announcement
One really cool move that Hidden Pineapple (the company behind Rowi) is doing to kick off the 2.0 version launch party is to reduce the price of Rowi to a rock bottom price of 99 cents for a limited time.
So – go check out Rowi and consider this a fantastic contender when it comes to Windows Phone twitter apps.
Full Change List
Now to the good stuff! Here’s a list of some of the biggest new changes/features:
- Readability integration for viewing web pages and saving bookmarks for later reading (added to Rowi’s save for later functionality)
- Support for RTL (Right to Left) languages display for tweets/messages
- New context menu for quick and easy access to common actions for tweets/messages (tap to open the menu, double-tap to select the tweet/message/item)
- You can now pin any home timeline, new tweet, new tweet #nowplaying, new message and search to your Windows Phone start screen
- Fast app switching support and now using the OS’ progress indicator (yes, Rowi is finally updated to take advantage of the latest major Windows Phone OS a.k.a. Mango)
Here is the full list:
home
- New reading experience for read/unread tweets/messages on the home timelines
- New reading style marks tweets as read as you scroll up (default/configurable behavior)
- Scroll to top automatically marks all tweets as read (by default)
- New column types (including but not limited to: retweets, favorites, etc.)
- Retweets are now included in list timelines
- Photo previews for tweets in timelines
tweet
- Tweet details page expands all t.co shortented URLs to show the originally tweeted URL
- Tweet details now show who retweeted it
- Conversation view on tweet details page
- Tweet details page now uses the same (new) RT popup as context menu
- Added a save for later button on tweet details page
message conversation
- Updated the message conversation style to better match the OS messaging conversation UI
new tweet
- Now playing added to new tweet screen to let you tweet about what you’re listening to
- New (remaining) character counter UI when composing new tweets or messages
- New image uploading services – Lockerz, yfrog, Twitter and TwitPic are all now supported
- Bitly URL shortening removed since twitter will shorten all URLs to t.co anyway
- Replying to a retweet now includes the retweeter
user profiles
- New “is following me” text on profiles to better understand mutual follow relationships
- Mentions pivot added to user profiles
settings
- New settings UI (tweaked for simplicity)
- New setting to specify preferred reading direction (newest, down or oldest, up). This affects where Rowi positions the timeline when new tweets are loaded
- New setting to skip the new tweets indicator and just auto-loading new tweets with an info message box across the top of the screen
- New setting to make all tweet calls to Twitter return the max amount of tweets (200)
- New setting to automatically load conversations on tweet details
- New setting to open the context menu on tap and hold instead of on tap (and select item on tap instead of double-tap)
- New setting to manually set tweets as read (instead of automatically when scrolled into view)
notifications
- Toast notifications now display inside of Rowi and take you to see the new tweets when tapped
- Added Rowi to the share menu
moar awesomeness
- Toasts for Mentions and Messages now take you to the correct mentions and messages pivots respectively in Rowi when tapped on. Yay! We know, it’s the little things. 🙂
- Better error message on invalid login
- Made info message box bigger so it’s easier to swipe away
- More accurate message for bad gateway errors from Twitter
- Changed placement of followers/following on user profiles to match Twitter.com
- When finished writing a new tweet from the new tweet tile, tapping the back button exits Rowi
- …plus a whole lot of refinement and bug fixes along the way
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Pretty cool features!
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