Tweetium 1.5 Released and It's Close to Perfect

If you're looking for a near perfect Twitter experience on Windows 8.1, the latest release of Tweetium is the app you've been looking for.

I reviewed Tweetium near the start of the New Year and stated that it would eventually be the best Twitter client for Windows 8. At that time, while Tweetium provided a thoroughly enjoyable experience, there were a few missing features. One of those features, that is a must-have for me, is the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts.

With the release of version 1.5 on Tuesday, Tweetium now supports up to 5 accounts with the purchase of a Pro version. The Pro version costs $4.99 per 6 months use. I'm not exactly excited about the payment plan – it's almost like an app rental – but the app is worth it, nonetheless. For what Tweetium provides, I'd gladly pay upwards of $40 just to own a lifetime copy. It's that good. The only difference between the original and Pro versions is the multiple account feature, for now. The developer is promising some additional, Pro-only, features soon. You can read about Pro here: Tweetium Pro is here!

Switching between different accounts is easy. As shown in the screen capture below, you simply tap the profile icon at the top right and choose which profile you want to access. This also works the same for the Tweetium Share Charm capability. When sharing content within Windows 8, you just tap the profile icon to choose which account to share from.

Additionally, each account retains per-profile customizations, meaning you can alter the theme to make each profile look unique.

The layout for Tweetium really brings together Windows 8's metro styling with a very Tweetdeck-like display. Each timeline is updated automatically so you can run Tweetium on a secondary monitor to watch a near real-time stream of information. This is important, particularly if you setup hashtag tabs at the top. Using the hashtag tabs, you can monitor those things important to you.

One thing I'm looking forward to testing out in the future is using Tweetium and the hashtag tabs to build a better Twitter wall at technical conferences. Carrying just my Surface, I'll be able to simply hook the device up to a large monitor and allow Tweetium to provide conference updates automatically. In the past, because no app like this existed, I'd have to build custom web pages to provide the same functionality.

In my original review (HERE), I also stated that due to the limitations at the time, I was forced to keep Tweetro+ installed alongside Tweetium. With the 1.5 release that is no longer the case. Last night I joyously removed all other Twitter clients from all of my Windows 8.1 systems and am using Tweetium exclusively. I'm finally comfortable with doing that.

Tweetium is a polished app with updates released constantly. I had some initial issues with the app and subsequent releases fixed every issue. The developer is very responsive to bugs and feature requests. If you use the app and have problems you can voice those to the app's Twitter account (@TweetiumWindows) and get a quick response.

There are a couple additional features I'm looking for, but they are not show-stoppers, and the developer has already stated at least one of those are in the works. The two feature suggestions I'm looking for is Toast Notifications and SkyDrive integration. The app currently does not provide notifications and again, is not a show stopper, but that also means it can't show notification counts on the Windows 8 lockscreen. The SkyDrive integration is important to me because Twitter limits the sizes of share photos. By integrating with SkyDrive, Twitter will accept a coded link to a shared photo on SkyDrive, eliminating the need to resize photos prior to posting to Twitter. In addition to photo sharing, a lot of apps utilize SkyDrive to store personalized features so they sync across multiple devices, which is useful. The developer indicated that Microsoft doesn't make SkyDrive integration easy, but he'd revisit it.

The 1.5 version release of Tweetium also brings additional features, bug fixes, and app enhancements. You can tread through the entire 1.5 change list here: Tweetium 1.5 change list