Look Later: Seesmic Look Follow-up

I wrote an initial look at the new Seesmic Look sporting a little Metro interface action. You can read that here. This is the follow up to that. I've been running Seesmic Look on all my computers since I wrote that initial post. I love the look, layout and balance between features and functionality. There are just a few small issues that have been nagging me and hopefully as Look iterates these will be addressed.

The first thing is the re-tweet function. In every other client re-tweeting copied the original tweet to a new tweet field and you could edit or add to the re-tweet. This does not exist in Look. It's an exact dupe or nothing. Kind of a curious usability decision on the part of Seesmic and it's a little disappointing to not be able to add several extra exclamation marks to emphasize how awesome something is. The fix here is obvious. Make the field editable.

The second issue I've had is another usability issue and not a technical one. The issue is with readability and scrolling. It's hard to explain the issue here. When scrolling you can only use the function icons(reply, retweet, DM) the tweet that is at the top of the column. While it isn't hard to tell where the top of the column is often its hard to tell that the scroll has taken place to get the tweet you want at the top of the column because the tweet below it may be similar or have the same sort of sentence structure as the one you were after. This is as much an issue with the graphics that frame the tweets as it is with the scrolling. The fix here is less obvious and would probably require some trial and error. Possibly changing the outline word bubble graphic around which ever tweet is at the top of the column might help. Like wise may be just a change in font size for the "selected", or top of the column, tweet would help distinguish it from the rest. I think it would also be helpful if the scrolling was a little smoother.

While it isn't the most feature rich client around it's certainly one of the easiest to look at and fun to actually use. I highly recommend it for the casual twitter user.

Look Seesmic Look

Seesmic Look is the newest Twitter client on the block coming from the creators of the original Seesmic Twitter client. It's also one of the first real life, on your desktop examples of Microsoft's Metro interface. This seems to me to kind of come out of left field but I'm not going to complain.

The layout and app is definitely a beautiful thing. There are two themes, a dark and a light, that are both equally beautiful and easy to read. It's not hard to figure out lists that slide out of the way as the next one comes in to view. It also has a hint of comic book charm with it's word bubbles and big soft edged fonts. If you can apply the word charming to software this app would be the one to use it with.

As for functionality it isn't a power users app. There is support for all the standard functionality that you would expect from virtually any Twitter app all of which is easily accessible. The few additional features seem aimed at the newcomer to twitter who might not recognize who the go to people are on twitter. This is broken down in to interest categories which then break down to individual twitter accounts of famous people, sites or groups. Along the same lines are trends which as the title implies is a list of whats trending and a brief explanation of each. Again nothing earth shattering but if you don't need a ton of features and you like pretty things then this is definitely for you.