Published by Steve Litchfield at 9:22 UTC, August 22nd 2018

Keeping track of what the official Twitter client is up to is tricky under Windows since a) the Store entries rarely have any useful information on updates (there was one overnight), b) most of the functionality upgrades are now server-side, and c) the official release notes are both confused and slightly out of date. Regardless, there's enough new in Twitter today that it's worth highlighting some new bits I've not mentioned before.





Specifically, for Windows 10 Mobile and Edge:

Videos can now be attached to tweets (limit 15MB).

Search results now highlight the query that was matched in each result.

When you upload Tweet photos, you can now attach descriptive text that will be read for screen reader users to help them understand the photo. Read more and learn how to enable this here: https://help.twitter.com/using-twitter/picture-descriptions.

Links to twitter.com from Edge browser will now open in the app.

A few relevant screens:

Deep down in Settings, you need to manually enable 'Compose image descriptions'; (right) there's then an extra 'add description' field to fill in for each attached photo.

Seen here is the tweet, the photo, and (in tiny font) what a blind person might hear read out for them for the photo in their 'screen reader'; (right) searching for something on Twitter now sees that search term emboldened in all matches.

Rotating your phone lets you read through Twitter in landscape, plus you can zoom in as needed, which can sometimes be handy.

Any references/links to tweets online now bring up that tweet in the Twitter PWA directly - very neat and integrated. Yes, even under Windows 10 Mobile!

You can grab or update the Twitter PWA-ified UWP client here in the Store. Enjoy night mode, enjoy the 280 character compatibility and tweetstorm feature, enjoy the new Explore layout and functionality, but it's still not as slick or as fully featured as the commercial third party client, Tweetium UWP, which offers every feature under the sun, right up to push notifications, and which I've been recommending for the last couple of years.

