Twisten – Listen to Twitter

What is Twisten?

Twisten is a twitter client that lets you listen to your twitter feed via Text-to-Speech using the built-in speech features of Windows.

Why use It?

Listen to twitter in the “background” while you do other stuff!

The benefit of listening in the background is that you don’t have to completely shift your focus away from your work to consume the tweets. Less context switching means you can stay productive, but still switch focus if you hear something that catches your attention.

Download and Installation

Getting Twisten is easy! It’s a “Click Once” application, meaning that you can install it from a web page. Then, it will automatically check for updates and ask if you’d like to use the updated version if found.

Get Twisten

Getting Started

The app is straight forward and easy to setup. After you download it, just click “Play” to start reading tweets. If it’s not authorized to access your twitter feed, then it will ask you to authorize.

Once authorized, it will starting reading your tweets to you. You can pause, go back a page, for forward a page, stop, and/or skip to the most recent.

You can control the speed of the reading via the speech rate slider.

It’s Free!

The app is free to use. If you find the app useful, please consider purchasing a copy to support future development efforts, as noted in the roadmap below.

Purchased versions skip the tiny Twisten intro message that is read when you start the application. To purchase the app, just click the purchase button and checkout with Google checkout. This will provide you with a key that you can enter by clicking on the Keys button.

Roadmap

Here’s the list of features I’d like to add to the app going forward:

1. Search capabilities
   This would allow including tweets that match a search phrase. Tweets would be interleaved with your main timeline.
2. User list capabilities
   Allow selecting an alternate twitter “list” as the main timeline to read.
3. Hyperlinking and Hash tag support
   Parse the tweets to make hyperlinks and hash tags into clickable links.

Support

If you have any questions or trouble with the app, please contact us via the blog, via the email in the about page of the app, or by leaving a comment here.

Prerequisites

Twisten requires .NET 4.0 (Full or Client Profile). It has been tested on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Enjoy!

---

Change Log

May 24, 2020

Fixed:

1. Authorizing and connecting to Twitter API. Required forcing the application to use TLS 1.2.

Aug 28, 2015

Fixed:

1. Authorizing and connecting to Twitter API. Prior version used an older library that only supported HTTP. Need to use HTTPS.

Enhancements:

1. Read tweets from a List. Just enter the list name and click play. The list must be one of your own lists. The app will attempt to remember the last position in each of the different lists that you listen to. To listen to your home timeline, leave the list name empty.
2. Show images that are embedded in tweets.
3. Remove the purchase requirement and nag message.

May 9, 2011

1. Updates to the way tweets are handled. Now it is as more of a continuous list, rather than a paged list.
2. Support for using up / down arrows to advance the reading to the next or previous tweet.
3. Hyperlink support. Click the ellipse to expand the tweet and see clickable hyperlinks.
4. Support for Read it Later. Use the clickable hyperlinks to send a tweet or it’s embedded links to Read it Later.
5. WIN+F12 hotkey support to bring Twisten to the foreground. This is helpful when you are in another app but want to mark something for later reading, or if you need to pause the stream.
6. Inline help tooltip
7. Change to check for updates in the background. This means that the app will not prompt you to update until the next time you launch it.
8. Update to encrypt passwords before saving them to disk.