The Metro design language emphasizes animation and responsiveness, and MetroTwit delivers on these principles, feeling fast and fluid. Progress bars are razor-thin, taking up just two or three pixels of vertical space. It's not perfect, and sometimes the interface gets a bit too clever. For example, the scrollbar has two indicators--one to show your current position, and one to show where the unread tweets begin. Due to the flat Metro look, none of these indicators looks like something you can "grip" to scroll, and I would routinely confuse the two and click the unread indicator instead of gripping the scrollbar handle. Once, I was unable to make the unread indicator go away, even after scrolling all the way to the top of the column: MetroTwit still insisted there was a tweet I didn't read, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

MetroTwit's free version is powerful and flexible, but it will only let you connect to Twitter with a single account, and it shows a banner on top of one of your columns (true to form, it lets you pick which column). To use it with more than one Twitter account and make the banner go away, buy MetroTwit Plus ($15 Australian Dollars, about $16 as of April 2012). While the Plus version is very full featured, it still won't let you schedule tweets, which is something you can do with TweetDeck.

MetroTwit's innovative look and feel are a sign of things to come, but its solid functionality and flexibility make it a Twitter client you can use today.

--Erez Zukerman