Welcome to Fenice 5
You’re going to love it
Fenice story starts in 2013, I was sixteen at the time and I wanted to challenge myself with a new complex project that involved working with some external APIs. I decided that a Twitter client would have been a cool way to learn new things and really challenge my knowledge at the time with “Metro” apps, C#, and Web APIs. I also learned the nightmare of working with limited APIs but that’s another story :)
In late 2013 “Project Blue Dog” was born. I spent months working on it without ever acknowledging its existence on the internet or even knowing if I would ever finish it.
Then a few days before Christmas 2013 I felt confident enough and, after a lot of work and a lot of learning, I opened a Twitter account and started teasing the app.
A few months went by and after a private beta, I started thinking how I should call this app. Luckly for me (and for you — I almost called it “Pige” or “Fenis” — no jokes allowed) a friend suggested “Fenice”. It’s the Italian for Phoenix and no, it’s not read the Italian way.
In May 2015, Fenice is born and it’s finally public! Wohoo!
Year after year Fenice changed and improved. From phone only it became a Universal app that could run on PC, Phone and Xbox. It has been quite a journey! I could continue narrating the story, but let’s make a quick jump forward and arrive to Fenice 4 in 2017. Honestly, I was ready to give up on Fenice as Twitter had failed developers repeatedly. Then Gustave Monce convinced me to start working on a new version and offered to help.
After working on it for over a year, today we’re finally ready to show you the result of our hard work, Fenice 5.
But first I must thank Gustave Monce for his help and his support because without him I’m not sure Fenice 5 would exist or be the best version of Fenice ever. I love it, hope you will love it too!
What’s new
Fenice 5 is a completely new application. We built it with the goal to make it a showcase of how’s possible to make a snappy, beautiful completely native Windows 10 app.
If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll find the familiar Fenice column layout with some changes. On the left you find the quick jump bar that allows you to quickly jump to any column you have added to your home screen.
See that + button in the quick jump bar? That’s where the fun starts.
When you click it, you’re presented with fifteen different types of column you can have in your home screen.
This lets you personalize your experience in incredible ways. You can even pin Twitter Lists and have your own curated timelines.
If you’re still staring at the home screen image, you’re surely be thinking “hey, but where’s the refresh button? The feed can’t update automatically” and you’d be wrong! EVERY column you have in your home screen will be updated at regular intervals (that you can customize) and to really flex, we’ll even keep the timestamps updated.
At the bottom right you find the Action Bar. Here you can open the Tweet/DM composer, Search, and access Settings from the … menu.
Tweet composer
The tweet composer is designed to not be intrusive and will allow you to continue seeing all your columns while you tweet your next typo. It lets you add images, GIFs (you can choose Giphy or Tenor), add your location and emojis.
A feature I personally love is drag & drop in the Tweet composer. You can drag & drop Tweets, to easily quote them, or images, to attach them to your Tweet. You can also drag & drop images from your computer.
Wait, a typo in my Tweet!
No need to worry, you can enable a five second delay that lets you double check your tweet and in case, undo and change its content.
If we were good at marketing, we’d call this “Editable Tweets*”.
Single column layout
A highly requested feature in Fenice 4 was a way to have a single column view feed and we finally delivered it in Fenice 5. In this mode you use the quick jump bar to change the currently displayed column. Everything else works the same and switching from one layout option to another is instantaneous.
Detachable columns
All columns from your home screen can be detached and opened as separate windows. You can even close the main app and everything will continue to work!
The screenshot above shows the dedicated UI the Direct Messages column shows once detached.
Filters
In Fenice 5 you can apply filters to almost any column. You can filter by Tweet content or authors.
These filters are column specific if applied directly from a column but can be applied app wide from settings. When a column filter is applied, you’ll see an indicator on top.
Settings
Fenice 5 offers so many personalization options and as soon as you edit something, you’ll see those changes apply in real time in the background. It’s magic!
A lot more
I could continue talking about Fenice 5 forever as there’s so much more. I hope you check it out, we can’t wait for your feedback!
Fenice for Twitter 5 is available for 3,99$ in the Microsoft Store starting today. Existing Fenice users will receive a 50% discount as a thank you for the support over the years, everyone else will see a 20% discount for the first week. Get it here!
We really wanted to release a Trial version of the app but right now Twitter allows access to API v2 only for a single app per developer, so we are unable to. If this changes, we’d love to offer a time limited trial version.
See you all on Twitter!
