Every once in a while an app comes around that’s so visually stunning you have to use it just to see it for yourself. In the gaming world, that was Crysis. In the Windows Twitter client world, it’s blu.

The Good

To say blu relies heavily on graphical beauty is a drastic understatement. Everything you do in this app has some kind of flashy transition or animation associated with it. If your computer can handle it, that’s a wonderful thing. I tested blu in Windows 7 on both a desktop computer and through VirtualBox on my MacBook and it looked awesome in both (VirtualBox doesn’t even have Aero).

Not cool enough to have a DM

blu employs the basic tabbed app browsing. In blu, you get a favorites tab, a home tab, and an inbox tab. Favorites doesn’t work like it sounds at first blush – it’s actually a group-like function of all the friends you mark as favorites. Once you mark a friend as a favorite, their most recent tweet will show up in the panel.

Looking up user profiles is pretty cool in blu, just click any user’s avatar and it’ll load their profile info and give you a few actions. If you want to, you can even load that person’s latest tweets (screenshots).

The Bad

The biggest beef I have with blu is that there is no replies tab. The only way to distinguish a reply from any other tweet is an icon in the background… except it appears that way for any reply, not just yours. The other big problem is that navigation and scrolling is horrendous. There’s no way to jump to the top once you’ve scrolled back 40 or 50 updates. You can scroll back as far as you want, but good luck getting back to the top.

The third of my gripes is that blu is a resource hog. I don’t know what’s to blame, but there’s no excuse for using 115MB of RAM right after opening (it jumped to 135MB after 15 minutes).

Something's wrong here...

The Verdict

Looks pretty, even without Aero. “Favorites” tab, messages tab, no replies tab, auto refresh at defined interval (at best 2 minutes), transparency settings. To load more, just scroll down ad infinitum. Nothing groundbreaking here but it’s definitely worth checking out. It’s not going to replace your Twhirl or TweetDeck anytime soon.

blu is for Windows Vista/Windows 7 with the .NET 3.5 Framework only.

Screenshots

The home timeline

Dynamic background updates character counter as you type

Tweet Options (left) & blu options (right)

Profile Lookup (left) & Favorites tab (right)