For over a month now, I have been working with two Aussie developers (David Golden and Winston Pang) on my first WPF software project, MetroTwit. Although we’ve kept much of our work to ourselves, an interesting event occurred yesterday that amused us and made us extremely eager to show off what we’ve been able to achieve with just a couple hours a night.
Recently, I have been inviting a small number of people to try out an early version of MetroTwit which is undeniably buggy but showed off enough to give people an idea of where we’re going to gather reactions and feedback.
To make sure this was manageable (since we wanted to focus on features and not bug fixes), we added a primitive authorization check to prevent it from accidentally spreading. Although we know some people have been keeping a close eye on MetroTwit, we underestimated just how desperate they were.
Yesterday while we were looking over the Twitter feed for “MetroTwit”, we noticed a link to a blog who claimed “exclusive” images of MetroTwit. And lo and behold, he actually figured out our private download site URL (it wasn’t very hard to guess) and put in the effort to bypass our authorization check so he could play with it. By the looks of his enthusiasm, I like to think he’s impressed. 
We’ve made a lot of progress since those builds and are very close to a wider technical bug-bash beta before our public release. If you’re interested in checking it out (without having to crack it), sign up below and we’ll ping you as soon as it’s ready. I look forward to hearing what you all think.
Update: Registration to technical beta now closed.
MetroTwit
I can’t wait to try it … just make sure it starts up faster than Seesmic for Windows
Looking forward to it Long, it looks really good.
I used Tweetdeck for a bit but I find Twitterfox so much more convenient, even though I had Tweetdeck pinned. Probably because of lack of things like an indicator. I’m looking forward to this
Sooo interesting! I want it!
And as a Microsoftee in Italy I can spread the word internally!
I love the look of it.
The only reason I still use TweetDeck is because I can update my Twitter and Facebook status at the same time. Maybe consider this?
Mackenzie.
Will be waiting to try it out soon.
Nice, cannot wait to try this
Have heard that J Allard is searching for a new job
On a more serious note: have you “hand-made” all the UI elements or are you using an API? It does look very usable!
Every graphics and UI control was made from scratch. We didn’t use any WPF toolkits or themes.
Yea, definitely can’t wait to try out the beta! Looks very good from the screenshots!
This looks great! However, the only concern for me is the XP style square X. I find the rectangular close window button so much easier to use on 7/Vista Systems, is there any way you can make the X box on metro twit a big larger than the restore and minimize buttons in order to reflect the UI changes in Vista/7?
That looks awesome…
I’m still looking for a replacement for DestroyTwitter… (unfortunately, development stopped on this amazing Twitter app).
Long: One problem all WPF twitter apps share (all WPF apps really): The list scroll, it’s not smooth and you lose visual track when scrolling bit height items (like twits). This is because the ListItem control does no allow partial scroll of an item.
Did you look into this problem?
You can turn that off with “CanContentScroll=False”.
Is really that easy? Seesmic/Thirteen23: Take note
No.. its not that easy. You get smooth scrolling at the cost of increased memory usage as data virtualisation is disabled. You’ll see 5-10x increase in memory (so from ~100mb to 500mb-1gb) in a social media client style app because every update is sitting in ram, rather than just the ones on screen.
You need to implement your own scrolling logic to allow the partial scrolling of items. It is frustratingly annoying implementing UI Virtualization along with IScrollInfo
Good luck though.
Looks great, Long! I submitted my address to be a tester, can’t wait for you to mail me a link
Wow! Zune style Twitter app. Does it have a small memory footprint too?
Should I use WPF (Expression Blend) or Flash to code for a new Facebook client I’m hoping to develop called “Pheonix”?
My only question is why not port it to a full trust Silverlight OOB app? You get “free” OSX support that way and a smaller runtime (5.7mb vs 24mb).
Some people tells me that Silverlight is not such a holy grail after all. It’s good, but WPF is so much better for client apps.
It largely depends, it’s lacking a few things, but with Silverlight4 it’s gotten a lot closer to parity with WPF on the more widely used features. It still has egregious omissions like having to use the Silverlight toolkit for something as simple as a WrapPanel, but WPF and Silverlight really learn from eachother.
For example SL got Commands from WPF and WPF got the VSM from Silverlight. It’s a trade off, but only in very specific scenarios. And debugging Silverlight is a PITA compared to WPF.
It somehow looks like teh Zune software, without all the weird pink UI elements.
looks great. do you have any plans to release this beautiful application in codeplex?
I wanna bid goodbye to Tweetdeck. Make it fast.
So silverlight wasn’t good enough?
I’m in!
Do all of you use Twitter clients instead of the web interface?
This is looking good, can’t wait for the release.
I’m on the beta-bash list, and I don’t even use twitter!
Any way to just get in there without a twitter account? I don’t really want one but I have a few twitter feeds that interest me and this app would be cool to follow them with.
Where’s my invitation?? C’mon I wanna try this so much!!
Did you actually do any programming yourself? Or is it another one of those things when you try and take the credit for the brains of others by just doing a bit of graphic design…?
Did you even read the first line of the article?
Like the clean “zune-like” UI!
博主的写的不错，前来顶下！
This cud be replacement for my blu(http://goo.gl/mamE) twitter app which i have been using for a while.
Ironically I’ve been trying to make a MetroUI Twitter client ever since I saw it with Zune Software…just that school got in the way (even though now I’m a graduate). One thing that I thing you should add is … somewhere put what the trending topics are. I’m not in the beta (unfortunately, I really do want to try it out) so I don’t know if you have it there. Here’s the idea I had (just a mock of what I was thinking): http://s53.photobucket.com/albums/g48/Sub-Zedox/?action=view¤t=m ock_skyytweet.png&newest=1
Trending Topics are meaningless for most people, I guess. – Except you’re a groupie of Justin Bieber and want to see his name on p1 almost each time when you check your tweets.
If MetroTwit gets a feature like that some day, please make it optional.
Great initiatives, I had a sneak pic of your application at MeuWindows’s blog and it’s impressive. So far it looks like a promising application (not many are working with WPF) and it’s worth adding to my bookmarks.
Thanks.
Looks good Long.
Although Twitter is just another time waster social network. But I guess it is useful for you marketing folk. I only use twitter occasionally so don’t need anything like this. =/
go download metrotwit now!
http://www.metrotwit.com/
really cool. im using it now and works well so far.
I registered for the beta!!!
Can’t wait
me silly… downloading it already
That’s a great work. and plz support custom API’s in the next version.
it will help almost 200000 twitter users.
thx.
Currently testing the beta, i’m sold!
Will there be any options to reduce the number of columns to only one (like twhirl) ?
This is already possible by clicking on the blue square with with the white number in it at the right side above each column.
I saw that while playing with it, thank you
.
There is a minimum size which i found a little to wide dor a single column. I hope that the team will allow us to reduce the size even more.
Keep up the good work, even though the application is not finished , it has already replace twhirl for me.
I only keep twhirl for url shortening and favorite.
Please consider making this a Silverlight OOB app in the future so all platforms can use it.
MetroTwit – Lol!
You know the word “Twit” means “Moron”…right?
How embarassing…
Not the first time that a nice product has a potential embarrassing name.
wii…
Ever heard of the iPad? Yep, that’s what they called it.
MetroTweet would have been a nicer name.
I liked the UI control of the application. I would ask on a post was created as the controls.
If you have some places where I can find.. would be of great help!
Thank you!
How can you people live with such a huge Twitter client? Maybe you guys don’t keep it open 24/7 like I do… I prefer Blu on the PC and Tweetie on the Mac. They’re small enough to just shove in a corner and leave open. Blu fits in well with my desktop gadgets, and Tweetie sits in the top right corner. Never do I close them.
Honestly, I’d NEVER be able to live with having such a huge Twitter client. Oh well, personal preference.
Developping Metrotwit is the title.
Downlod Technical Beta is the link to the program.
Beta is an important information.It is also used on “Beta feedback form” which is self explanatory.
You can criticize a released program, but a beta?
Oh well, like you said.
Can you make the minimum width of a column smaller?
It is too wide when you have only one column showing.