The Carbon for Android preview

Fire up Carbon for the first time and you're greeted by the familiar hawk logo. (OK, familiar if you've used Carbon before, I suppose.) Logging into your Twitter account is the same process as in any other app. White-on-black themes aren't anything new, but Carbon's timeline design is cleaner than just about any we've used. Not throwing extraneous colors into the mix for links and Twitter handles makes a difference here. Not that those things aren't there, it's that your eye is drawn to the things that matter: Who sent the tweet, their avatar, how long ago it was sent, and the tweet itself.

You get four or five tweets on the timeline, depending on how long they are and whether there's any media attached, such as a Youtube preview or an image. (The Youtube API isn't implemented in our preview build, but it could be added later, the developer tells us. Look for a few other tricks, such as a Vine viewer, too.)

Pull down to refresh, and the timeline tilts on you to show that it's refreshing. It's much cooler than Android's stock method of a glowing light at the top of the list, and it gives it sort of a Star Wars opening crawl look. A number will pop up after the refresh, showing how many new tweets are in that timeline. (Be sure to note the animation here. Nice touch.)

Flipping between your main timeline, mentions and direct messages is as simple as swiping left and right. When you do that, little header icons will pop down. You can tap them to hop from one timeline to the other, if you prefer. There's no obvious way to jump to the top of a timeline -- and this is but one piece of functionality that differs from most other Twitter apps we've used. Instead, swipe down with two fingers to go to the top of the timeline. Or swipe up with two fingers to go to the end. It's easy, but there's no obvious way to know it's there (at least in our preview build).

Swipe left from the main timeline (by swiping your finger right -- remember motions are all backward, which makes writing this sort of thing fun), and you get the accounts selector. Carbon supports multiple Twitter accounts, which is must for many of us. There are no unified timelines -- you're either looking at one account or another. We go back and forth on which we prefer. (We're admittedly a poor usage case for this sort of thing -- large accounts with a lot of @ replies make a mess out of things pretty quickly.)

A couple ways to interact with individual tweets: You can tap on one to bring up the whole thing, and from there you get buttons to reply, quote, retweet and favorite. There's also an overflow menu (the three-dots menu button) that adds the option to copy the tweet, copy a link to the tweet, or share it via the usual Android sharing options.

Or, if you don't want to open the individual tweet, you can long-press on it from the timeline to open up the reply/retweet options. (Don't linger too long on the screen here, though. Any vertical movement will start a timeline refresh, and the reply/retweet buttons will disappear.)

The conversation view -- in which you can see a series of tweets between you and someone else -- is downright beautiful. Start in an individual tweet and you'll see the replies at the bottom. Pull the tweets up, and the original rotates a bit and heads to the background, making way for the full conversation.

At the bottom of the timeline views are three buttons -- a "+" for composing new tweets, the avatar of the account you're currently using (tap it to view that profile), and another overflow menu button. Tap the latter, and from the right-hand side pops out more list options: Favorited tweets, lists, trendy trending tweets, search, filters and settings. (The settings options weren't completed in our preview build and only pulled up an account selector -- we'll update this post when the full version is released.) Again, there are some nice, subtle animations here.

Composing a tweet isn't exactly rocket science, but it's nicely done in Carbon for Android. If you're using more than one account, you can choose from which you want to post here, but you can't post to more than one at a time. (That's probably not a huge deal for most people.) You've got a few choices for adding a picture -- take a new one, choose one you've already taken -- or you can chose the last picture you took with your phone. It's a cool feature, but on the other hand if I just took a picture and want to tweet it immediately, I'll probably share it directly from the gallery attached to the camera app instead of switching to a Twitter app first. Depending on how often you take pictures with your phone, there's a decent chance you won't remember the last shot you snapped.

Updated Feb. 3: Here's a look at the Settings menu. Note how you can toggle which accounts will ping notifications. You've also got shortcuts to the accounts manager and to ping Carbon for Android for support.

Other initial thoughts ...