A step in the Windows Phone direction

After owning five iPhones spanning three distinct generations, I recently made the jump to Windows Phone 7 in the form of the Nokia Lumia 800. The decision to abandon a great phone and years of procuring just the right apps wasn’t easy. The iPhone truly did revolutionise in the way we use our mobile phones. But once an innovator is now quite stagnant in offering a handful of features to the phone and OS every generation.

Microsoft has skilfully created a fresh & stylish yet very utilitarian mobile operating system. Windows Phone 7 and its Metro design language has brought some excitement back into my daily mobile experience in just a week of using it. Some recognition must be given to Nokia for making such a beautiful piece of hardware to compliment the OS.

MetroTwit Show, the Twitter visualizer

It’s nice when the Twitter visualizer you’ve always wanted materialises out of the blue in such style. MetroTwit Show has just filled a large void where users with large displays and TV’s yearning to consume auxiliary information such as twitter trends & topics at a glance.  It is built on Silverlight 4 and installs instantly on your desktop with a single-click on its homepage.

Currently it allows read-only viewing of Twitter trends & searches. This is just the first release with many more features expected to be added. No doubt this app will start appearing on large displays near you.

Windows 8, a preview

One of the things previewed today at the D9 conference was an early version of Windows 8 demonstrated by Steven Sinofsky. Looks like a giant Windows Phone? Well they seem to have finally incorporated the Metro UI into the next version of Windows.

Here’s a detailed look at what’s in store:

UPDATE: The full Windows 8 demo from the D9 conference is now available.

MetroTwit, the Twitter client for Windows

From its inception last year, MetroTwit has matured into a fully featured Twitter client. It is in part designed and developed by Long Zheng of istartedsomething.com fame. The interface is inspired by Microsoft’s Metro design language which in turn makes it a joy to read tweets.  It is by far the best Twitter client I have used on Windows and with development speeding ahead it is likely to remain the Twitter client of choice.