Building Tweeten (Premium)

I have been a long-time TweetDeck user. It's one beast of a product that really takes Twitter to the next level for almost anyone, even if you aren't a professional. Over the years, though, TweetDeck has been neglected by Twitter. It's only recently TweetDeck started receiving some meaningful updates, though the product continues to lag behind Twitter's other apps.

And that's exactly why I built Tweeten.

Tweeten first started off as a simple Chrome extension, back in 2015. I was simply just playing around with Chrome extensions and built a "theme" for TweetDeck. It was called Flat TweetDeck, and it was a really simple CSS theme for TweetDeck that made the app look slightly better. Flat TweetDeck didn't get much traction — it was way too simple, didn't add any additional functionality, and looked pretty much like TweetDeck itself.

Fast forward a few months, it's Christmas and I was bored at home. I didn't use to play a lot of games back then, and had a ton of free time, like most other 15-year-olds. One night, I was browsing around the web and bumped into Electron — a framework that lets you build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript. It seemed pretty cool, so I started playing around with it. And then it hit me: let's combine Flat TweetDeck with an Electron app, and turn it into a desktop app.

https://twitter.com/mehedih_/status/616993687969603584

While everyone was out celebrating New Year's Eve, I messaged my good friend Gustave, sharing the idea with him. He was also a TweetDeck user, and I wasn't a good developer at all, so I asked for his help and we started building a TweetDeck wrapper with Electron; Tweeten was born.

Tweeten was a brand-new beginning for me. I didn't simply just re-use Flat TweetDeck's file — instead, I gave it a completely new look. Windows 10 was also released around the same time, so I decided to take some inspiration from Windows 10's new design for the new app. The name "Tweeten" even comes from Windows 10 — Tweet, and 10.

And after a couple of weeks in development, we released the first alpha version to 100 users. The response was overwhelming, and we iterated the app and the design rapidly. The entire app was so fun to build and grew so quickly in terms of functionality, it's almost unbelievable how we even managed to pull it off. Both of us were full-time students, and I was mostly busy writing about Microsoft at WMPoweruser. It was quite difficult to find time to work on Tweeten, but we managed to get some time over weekends and make this app one of the best Twitter apps available for Windows.

Months passed by after the initial release of Tweeten, we added lots of customization options, features, a light theme, and so much more. But no one was really using Tweeten. It was just an alternative to TweetDeck's app.

Fast forward to March 2016, Twitter announces it's shutting down TweetDeck on Windows. And that was that for Tweeten. It took off. Like really took off — g...