[tweetmeme]The day the App Store launched, Iconfactory had Twitterrific 1.0 ready for the public. It carried over that same aesthetic as their previous flagship Mac client, and ruled the market for a good half year, ultimately making way for Tweetie, an unknown app from an unknown developer. Soon Tweetie for iPhone became the twitter client to have, and Loren Brichter became Loren Brichter—the rockstar developer that TechCrunch publishes every tweet of. Iconfactory tried to catch up, with Twitterrific 2, but the user interface they ended up was a cobbled mess of things. It was very pretty and feature rich, but you had to think twice before pressing a button. Realising they lost their way, they went back to the drawing board, to rediscover their vision, or something like that.
And now we have Twitterrific 3.
Let’s start with how simple it is. It’s very simple. It has shed so much UI chrome, it’s practically Twitterrific 1.0 all over again. And therein lies the problem. Twitterrific 1.0 worked fine in 2007, because that’s what Twitter of 2007 was like. The Twitter of 2010 is way different.
In a bid to simplify the user interface, they’ve taken every feature and spread it across the app so you have to jump through multiple layers to get to simple actions. Twitterrific 3 requires way more taps than necessary. Want to switch to reply to someone? It’s tap to bring up the tweet. Tap to bring up the actions menu. Tap to reply. Want to view a conversation? It’s under “More Actions”. Switching between your timeline and mentions is two taps.
I believe they did something good with their iPad app. It was a little uncomfortable an idea at first (I bitched about it a lot), and while I still think the perfect iPad twitter client is yet to be made, I got used to it. It’s very simple, yet accessible, and because of the large-scale use of popovers, you never lose context of where you are (mostly because of the way the iPad presents itself). They decided to go in a similar direction with the iPhone app, but just as the iPad is not a larger iPhone, the iPhone is not a smaller iPad. The iPhone version loses all context for any action performed. When you bring up the tweet in full view, the eye has to familiarise itself with the new view before being able to perform an action. Whereas if the context remains the same, it’s much easier and quicker for the finger to move to the desired locations.
Simplification of the user interface doesn’t mean ‘hide everything from sight’. A user’s workflow has to be taken into consideration, such that simple repeated tasks, like replying, don’t take more actions than absolutely necessary. That’s one thing Loren Brichter knew how to do. With Tweetie, you can tap the tweet and tap reply as part of its ‘simple UI’, but the swipe gesture revealed all that power to the experienced user. And now I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use the swipe gesture to perform actions in Tweetie. Pull down to refresh is another brilliant idea that has taken over so many apps; it’s so hard to miss, it clears clutter, it simplifies things. That is simplification of user interface, not hiding them under layers of actions. As far as Twitterrific’s innovations go, you can tap the ‘in reply to…’ text string once you bring the tweet into full view, to bring up the conversation.
When it comes to more specific issues, Twitterrific 3 shows you smaller avatars, almost unrecognisable. Smaller avatars might be acceptable if they showed you more tweets in your timeline, but Twitterrific 3 shows you less in your timeline [old vs new]. If you notice, the tweet time on the left hand side doesn’t really float to the right, instead occupying an entire column for itself. And even though they’ve simplified so much, the reply screen is way too crowded, as they try to shove the tweet you’re replying to under the compose area [seen below]; unlike Tweetie which requires you to pull down on the text. And who needs to view their profile so often they had to add a special button to the timeline view?
But Iconfactory isn’t interested in addressing the needs of you and me. Craig Hockenberry himself said that it’s not for geeks. It’s for grannies and uncles. I don’t know how they figure iPhone users are feature hungry complex UI loving nuts, but thats their opinion of ‘us’. I’ve seen some chatter on twitter, where even geeks have expressed positive feedback toward the app. My guess is it’s because Twitterrific is a new toy, has a much better initial impression than its predecessor, and let’s face it, minimalism is a cool religion to follow. But I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them switch back to the more efficient, yet simple, Tweetie (yeah, yeah, I know it’s now called Twitter for iPhone).
Twitterrific 3 is a free ad-supported universal app, that’s $4.99 to unlock via an in-app purchase.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Grannies and uncles who’ve bought an iPhone up to now will probably have tended towards the cheaper 3G model. If Twitteriffic 3 is really for them, why is performance on these devices so poor? Switching between displays is extremely sluggish, which is especially unfortunate when you have to do this so often. I’d enjoy the sparseness of the interface if the app felt correspondingly nimble, but it lumbers from screen to screen like an arthritic hippo.
In fact, I miss twitterrific 2. I would love the 2 with ios 4 features.
Spot on with all commentary. I like the overall look of the new Twitterrific but it’s fairly unuseable. Hopefully they will start refining the flow and adding back in features to bring it up to par. For now, as you say, back to Tweetie/Twitter.
For me the deal breaker was the modal display (albeit a lovely one) when sending to Instapaper. It’s called read *later*.
Quite the opposite for me – I find the paring back of features a refreshing way of using Twitter. I got tired of Tweetie/Twitter and switched to Twitterrific 2. Using Twitterrific iPad, I began to love how simplified they made it, and this iPhone version has the same great style and features.
This is the app that Twitter should have put under their name, it is more true to the simplicity of Twitter.
We have to rebuild everything from the ground up to support Twitter’s new features. And once the unification process is over ( iPhone, iPad and Mac ), we can then add features back into Twitterrific across the board.
Some iPhone specific features we want badly, such as short cuts, will be back. We want to get it right, instead of putting everything in right away. And we are listening to feedback, to decide what is the most important feature before we implement it.
Thanks for listening.
Hi Talos,
Thanks for commenting. I like Twitterrific a lot on the iPad, with all the modal popups it’s a snap and very clean to use.
The iPhone version just feels like looking at the iPad version through an iPhone-screen-sized hole, except without popups. And the speed is not great.
Also, it’s incredibly difficult to use with one hand which might not have been your goal at all, but I often use my iPhone one handed and prod and swipe with my thumb. The button placement in Twitterrific is such that I would have to have a very odd, long, prehensile thumb to do that!
The Instapaper comment above is very valid.
But the biggest problem for me is the refresh system. It doesn’t seem to refresh when you reply which leaves a stack of your own tweets out of context at the top of the timeline. Also, it doesn’t seem to refresh on start or reactivation?
And honestly, pull down to refresh is virtually a standard now so I am surprised you did not implement that.
I don’t think these things are feature bloat but rather part of the standard set of features almost all iPhone users have come to expect. I appreciate your comment about unifying your codebase but I hope you get it done soon!
Speaking of which, when can we expect to see the Mac version coming?
Thanks, John
We have a development plan for Twitterrific, it will take us some time to get there, but unification of all versions is the most important process for us now.
We need to streamline the Apps before we can add more refinement, otherwise, we will keep putting out fire one App at a time, when another App’s customer base complaint they get no love. The Mac version is the perfect example, so many requests for iPad and iPhone, and have to put the Mac version on hold.
Our focus is now back on the Mac version now, and we are doing something we never done before. Not sure how long this will take. But if this pans out… the future will be very interesting.
Do yourself a favor and keep Twitterrific 2 if you still have it. It’s MUCH better than Twitterrific 3.
Problem is Twitter is gonna hit that OAuth switch (or have they already?) so the client won’t be supported anymore. Besides, iPhone 4 users would prefer updated graphics for the high res display.