The last few posts relating to this social review have featured me complaining a lot about the Twitter clients available for Windows Phone 7. The sluggish performance and instability seems to be confined to these clients, for some inexplicable reason. So I’ve decided to make a video blog featuring these apps and sure enough a lot of my complaints are verified.
As you’ll see in my video, the Seesmic app crashes when I try to load it – I wasn’t able to start Seesmic until I rebooted the phone after I finished making the video. This is a frequent occurrence with the official Twitter app as well, although the issue didn’t reproduce itself in this video.
Twitter apps video blog, filmed 30 November 2010
Thanks for the honest review. The new version of Twozaic (1.3) has a lot of performance upgrades (caching, preloading, faster start-up, …) . It just got accepted to the marketplace and should popup in your updates soon.
Hi Bert, thanks for taking the time to comment on my somewhat obscure blog! Great to hear that updates are coming – I will post a follow up review when version 1.3 hits the marketplace.
Hi Robert. I just want to let you know that you and your co-reviewer are right about performance problems that only seem to emerge with twitter apps. It’s a technical issue for all apps when they are communicating with twitter’s remote interface on twitter’s servers. Those server’s are often overloaded resulting in very slow replies or even no replies because of time-outs, or very strange and lots of different error replies. The errors are also very random, 2 succeeding calls to the twitter servers can result in a time-out error, and a quick direct reply after it. As a result the twitter app developers have a hard time to inform the user what exactly went wrong and why.
Another issue is that a lot of information that is shown on one screen must be fetched from the servers in multiple calls. In the first version of my app I did those calls one per one after each other, to not hammer the twitter servers to much. Other apps do them in parallel, which I’m doing now too.
Just some technical internals information to explain
Seems like Twitter need to upgrade their servers. That said, the iPhone apps don’t seem to be afflicted with the issues anywhere near as badly, which leads me to think that the Silverlight overheads are proving problematic.
Nevertheless, Twozaic is performing a lot better now.
Pingback: Better late than never: The Social Review Wrap Up | Unbridled Truth