Sure, there’s Carbon for Windows Phone, Mehdoh, Birdsong and even the barbaric official Twitter client, but Rowi has always been the platform darling since it was released. Windows Phone Mango has been out for nearly six months, but the team at Rowi decided to take its time releasing a Mango-optimized version, that would take advantage the many improvements to the software, and work great on the new hardware, that have emerged since October 2011.
Rowi 2.0 has been in the works for many months — I have been using the beta since November — and it has steadily gotten better with each iteration. Whereas the pre-Mango version was the epitome of inconsistent, with stuttered scrolling and unreliable notifications, version 2.0 improves upon both those things and more. The timeline, which is where you will spend most of your time within the app, feels like it was lathered with butter, while the app itself opens and resumes almost instantly, far quicker than any other Windows Phone app I’ve used.
By default, tapping on a tweet brings up a horizontally scrolling context menu; you can view the tweet itself (to see a conversation), reply, retweet, view the user’s profile, or follow a link. You can change this behaviour in the Settings menu, which too has been expanded to support many of the modern Twitter amenities like Readability support and uploading photos to Twitter directly.
Conversations load up almost immediately, too, which provides an experience akin to using Tweetbot on the iPhone; the speed at which you can obtain information on Rowi 2.0 is astounding.
The timeline has a few bugs that need to be sorted out, though: occasionally, when tapping on the screen to stop it from scrolling, you’ll inadvertently activate a tweet, which will either bring up the context menu or leave the timeline altogether. While the “tap-to-stop” IQ has improved since version 1.5 it is still quite vexing since it happens only intermittently.
Inline picture viewing has also been added to the timeline, which can open either inside the app, or optionally in IE. They even took the time to support Instagram, something that will make a lot of WP7 users a bit jealous.
Rowi’s Live Tile has been beefed up too. Adding it to your home screen will show unread replies and DMs. You can also pin a Quick Tweet shortcut to the homescreen for those immediate thoughts. Toast notifications have been improved, and are now more reliable, though they don’t arrive nearly as quickly as those from the official iPhone or Android app. I’ve argued before that toast notifications on Windows Phone are not sufficient for an advanced smartphone OS, especially when you’re receiving multiple messages in a short period of time. The Live Tile, therefore, is your only context once that notification has disappeared, so Rowi has made the best out of a difficult situation here.
The settings menu is pretty comprehensive, running the gamut of standard options like “Open links in IE” to the more obscure stuff like “Always load tweet conversations.” By playing around with them I found the right combination, and there are enough there to please most power users. There is still no way to see replies to tweets within the app unfortunately.
One of the app’s best, and likely most underused features, is the Configure Home Screen menu, which allows you to add various tabs to your main account screen including search items, another user’s timeline, a saved or public list, your favourites, your tweets retweeted, retweets by you, and retweets by others. This brings immediate reference to a number of lesser Twitter features, many of which are imperative to a power user.
More important than what the app is, or what it can do, is what it represents for Windows Phone. There is a distinct lack of “hero” apps for the platform, and there needs to be more Rowi’s out there to prove what it can do. Metro has a unique design language which poses its own challenges, and developers who wish to succeed on Windows Phone cannot merely port over an existing iOS or Android app. They must be judicious in their planning, and swift in their execution, in order to win over the influx of Windows Phone users destined to arrive with the Nokia Lumia 900.
Rowi 2.0 is available in an ad-supported free version, and, for a limited time, 99c as a paid app.
