I recently switched my primary twitter app from Plume to Fenix. On UI and features, both have their pros & cons, but Plume’s usability had taken a massive dive recently with long delays and freezes. Fenix, on the other hand is as fast as they get. Probably, even faster than Twitter’s own app!
While Fenix is faster, prettier, and generally more pleasant to use than Plume, it also has a few serious drawbacks – especially for users like me, with multiple Twitter accounts.
After 3 weeks of using it, I’ve even come to like some of its drawbacks (no multi-account integrated timeline – allows focus), and been desperately hunting/craving/begging for others to be removed.
This post is a list of those nettlesome issues, and my suggestions on how to remove them.
1. Easy switching between accounts
Currently, switching between timelines on two accounts requires: an edge swipe and a slightly problematic tap1. While this is an improvement from the earlier edge swipe + 2 taps, it’s still not fast or efficient enough.
Suggested solution: Swipe on action bar to switch between accounts.
Swiping on the list of tweets currently switches between various columns – timeline, mentions, DMs, favourites, etc. Swiping on the action bar would switch between accounts in a similar manner. In fact, this UI pattern is already used by Chrome for Android – we can switch between adjacent browser tabs by swiping on location bar / action bar2.
2. Add ability to post same tweet from multiple accounts
The compose tweet function in Fenix is better than the timeline feature – user can start composing from either account and switch, with 2 simple taps, to another account. It also has the best integration of ‘drafts’ functionality that I’ve seen across any twitter app so far3.
However, it lacks a very important feature for multi-account users – ability to post the same tweet from multiple accounts in one go. Plume accomplishes this quite well (3rd screen in the image below), and it would be really great to see a similar functionality come to Fenix.
3. Better muting / filtering functionality
The changes requested so far are (mostly) UI tweaks that enhance experience for multi-users. The muting/filtering feature upgrade requests below, however, are highly relevant for all users. Also, of all the functionality in Fenix, this is one area where I feel it really needs to improve by quite a bit.
1) Apply new filters to both new tweets and the tweets already downloaded
The current implementation of muting in Fenix works by applying the set filters on new, incoming tweets. While this works for long-standing filters, it’s not very useful when you wake up in the morning to see your timeline full of tweets with a random, useless hashtag, say #ReplaceAMovieTitleWithGoat.
Now, even if add a new muting rule to filter out that #tag, it only prevents new tweets from being added to my timeline. I still need to hurdle past the 100s of unwanted tweets with that #tag already in.
Suggested solution: Every time the filter/mute list is updated, run the filter function on all the tweets in the current timeline. Just as it would be run on incoming tweets.
My hunch here is that the filter function is being run when the tweets arrive from Twitter’s backend to the app, and only the unfiltered ones are sent for storing locally to the content provider4. For filtering (and unfiltering) of already downloaded tweets to work, the code needs to be changed so that it stores all tweets, and filters them when the content resolver/adapter4 fetches them from content provider to populate the list.
2) Filter out tweets sent using specific apps
Twitter’s API provides, for every tweet, the source app used to post that tweet. Fenix uses this information in the detailed tweet display mode:
While this may be marginally useful from information perspective, it’s far more useful if the app could also provide a filter to mute tweets published using certain apps. Plume did an excellent job on this front, and prevented cluttering of timeline with automated tweets published using some very unsocial apps:
3) Create filters using regular expressions, or even clear text.
Creating simple word based filters is quite straightforward in Fenix. However, that’s all it supports. There is no support for defining filters as regular expression. Furthermore, due to a possible snafu in the app code, some text-based filters don’t work either.
As an example, I have been using ‘.@’ as a filter for a while on Plume. This filters out the tweets that begin with ‘.@twitterhandle …’, which I rarely find useful or entertaining, on Plume.
It also filters out an occasional valid tweet, which could be avoided if Plume supported regex filters, in which case the filter would have been: ^.@\S
Fenix, sadly doesn’t accept either. There’s no support for regular expressions in filters. And using ‘.@’ produces a confusing result – filtering out a lot of tweets, both those beginning with, and not beginning with, ‘.@’. My guess is that the text string provided by the user isn’t sanitised by the app before being added to the filter regex in the code.
4. Better image previews in timeline
Fenix currently offers 3 options for image previews in timeline – large (left screen below), small (middle screen), or none.
The large screen option looks beautiful! However, most images take up so much screen real estate that browsing through the list becomes a bit of a chore.
The small screen option makes the list quite nice and compact – perfect for quickly scrolling through. However, the size is so small that for most images, the preview doesn’t even offer much of a hint of the full image’s content. Result is user opening a lot more images in full view mode.
I really like Plume’s approach here:
full-column-width preview, cropped to a standard height.
Cropping by height ensures the image leaves space for more tweets, while the full-width preview gives a much better idea of the image’s content. It would be wonderful to have a similar middle-path image preview option in Fenix.
For consumers of content tags, or #tags, serve two primary functions:
The Follow function: To follow news of interest (e.g. a column with #lbl tweets showing latest updates from the race without me having to follow it live on TV), and
The Filter function: To filter out specific content from the stream for various reasons, such as
to either avoid listening news before we want to (match scores, movie spoilers), or
to avoid getting drowned in updates during big events (SXSW, Google IO, WWDC, IPL, SuperBowl tweets taking over the timeline for brief periods), or
to remove news from the timeline that we’re not at all uninterested in.
Content & platform companies all love the follow function, and have tried to make it as easy as possible for users to access it.
It’s understandable. Apart from allowing easy search, this also presents a straightforward way of targeting advertising to users based on interests. This ability to show relevant advertising – Specialized Shivs to users following IronMan world championships, and the latestBAAS to developers following Google IO – is extremely valuable to these companies.
The filter function, on the other hand, is almost universally neglected. None of the content consumption platforms that I use – Twitter, Google+, WordPress and Pocket – offer any easy built-in way of filtering out content. All of them make it trivially easy to follow specifically-tagged content using tags or #tags.
A large number of popular 3rd party Twitter clients have the feature to filter out specific content, indicating the strength of user demand for the filter function. That 3rd party clients have this feature, also indicates that technical complexity isn’t the reason holding back content platforms themselves from providing this function.
Users want to cut out noise & irrelevant info from their content streams, yet none of the content serving companies make it easy for them.
Are there any technical, UX, business, or legal reasons for most content companies not providing filtering functions, or is it just a conscious, unfortunate, neglect of end user needs?
One of the earliest feature requests of Google+ users was for an ability to define the default home stream / circle. Seems like the G+ team introduced this feature without publicity sometime over the holiday period (or maybe I missed all the publicity being away from the Internet for almost a fortnight).
I just discovered this feature a moment ago when browsing through some circle specific timeline. Google+ now allows users to define how many posts from any particular circle appear on their home timeline:
Click on the circle link in the left navigation bar to go to that circle’s stream. Once there, you get a slider on the top left of content section to define how many posts appear in the home timeline.
On that slider, Google+ offers 4 sets of options for each circle’s stream:
No Posts
Fewer Posts
Most Posts
All Posts
Glad to have some way of controlling the behaviour of my home stream. Now that it’s here, it’d be great if G+ provides this filtering function on user basis as well, along with the circle-basis it does now.
Now for a note of small concern – when you visit a circle’s page, you realise that the default setting for filtering is ‘Most Posts’, which means some posts may never appear on your home timeline (which is the only one most of us check). While this may be fine if a user knowingly chooses that option, but having it enabled by default means that users may never see certain posts on their timeline, without knowing it could happen.
This is similar to what Facebook regularly does, and is regularly criticised for by G+ users. Would be a pity if Google decided to go down that route without informing users first.