Loren Brichter is a designer and developer with quite an impressive track record. He's created popular apps like Tweetie and Letterpress. And he was also a member of the original iPhone team at Apple.
So needless to say, when Brichter talks, people listen. And he recently sat down with the folks at GigaOM and gave his thoughts on a few things, including Apple's shakeup, and Jony Ive's new role...
Tweetie, a beloved Twitter client for the iOS and OS X, was first in many respects. It was first to introduce the pull to refresh feature, now a norm in iOS app design (even Apple borrowed it for iOS 6 Mail). The program set the tone for what a decent Twitter client should be long until TapBots' Tweetbot came into full view.
Tweetie was refined and refined until Twitter came along purchasing both iOS and Mac versions on April 9, 2010. And now its developer Atebits is back to iOS development with a game, another first for them. Called Letterpress and provided free of charge, it's basically a word game with a simple, charming design and addictive concept that's hard to put down...
Users have been calling for Apple to implement the popular 'pull-to-refresh' feature into Mail and other native iOS apps for quite some time now. The function, which is found in Tweetbot and several other third-party applications, allows you to refresh the on-screen information by pulling down on the app's UI.
But judging by this report from designer Dustin Curtis, we won't be seeing the easy refresh option integrated into native iOS apps anytime soon. Why? Well apparently Twitter owns the patent to it...
Twitter has acquired the popular Tweetdeck platform for a rumored buyout of $40-$50 million. This move is surprising considered that Tweetdeck very recently updated its iPhone app with a whole new design and set of features.
Tweetdeck has been a staple, cross-platform Twitter client for years. Twitter's buyout seems to be a reaction to UberMedia's original proposal to buy Tweetdeck.
What does this mean for the Twitter/Tweetdeck apps? That's the question on everyone's mind.
The folks at Tapbots have done it again. Tweetbot is a new Twitter client for the iPhone that's made quite a splash. Not many apps can be described as "joyful UI design" or "an excellent innovator of the Twitter platform." Some would say the app even "feels like a privilege" to use.
Tweetbot may very well be the app that gives the official Twitter client a run for its money. Let's take a look...
The App Store has never been a very quiet place. 2010 was no exception; thousands upon thousands of new apps were submitted to the App Store. Most of them aren't worth mentioning, but there have been some exceptional apps that have risen to the forefront of what the App Store has had to offer throughout the year 2010.
We've covered a lot of App Store apps this year on iDB, with the goal of keeping our readers in the know.
Now, we’d like to take some time to reflect on our favorite App Store apps of 2010. Being included on this list doesn’t necessarily mean the app was released in 2010, it just means that it was amongst our most utilized of this year. Drumroll, please…
The official Twitter app for iPhone and iPad was just updated to support native push notifications for @mentions and direct messages. Push notifications can be enabled in a new pane for your account settings.
Push notifications for  the Twitter app (and what was formerly Tweetie) has been a highly desired feature for a very long time. I'm sure we're all glad that Twitter has finally gotten around to implementing a feature that should have been part of the app when it was first released...
This post is a call to action to anyone who uses one of the best Twitter iPhone apps out there: Tweetie 2. Note that if you don't use Tweetie, you can still help. Read on for more details...
Since Atebits launched the version 2 of Tweetie, they crippled a key feature of the application: the RT (retweet) feature. In the old version, you could RT a tweet by simply tapping "Retweet". It would then look like this:
RT @tweetie I should improve the RT feature on #Tweetie2
In the new version of Tweetie, you have 2 different options to retweet. None of them really fit me or most power users. You now have the option to "Retweet" using Twitter's new RT feature, which 64% of users don't like, or you can use the "Quote" option, which is not really a retweet and adds the odd "/via @username" at the end of you tweet.
A quick search on Twitter shows that I am not the only one disliking the new way Tweetie handles retweets and I was thinking we should tell the developer that we want the old RT feature back.
The best way to get heard is to retweet the hell out of this article so @Atebits (the developer) or @Tweetie hear us. Hopefully the developer will listen to the community and bring the old RT method back to life.
If you are on Twitter, please help us out by clicking here to retweet this article (there are also 2 RT buttons on this page). Thank you in advance for your help!
I am a big Twitter user and I do most of my tweeting using Tweetie, which is my favorite Twitter app for iPhone. Recently I've been getting the same error more and more often and it's getting very annoying: Secure Connection Failed.
I dug a bit into the problem and found out that I am not the only one having this Secure Connection Failed issue. Tweetie's account on Twitter says that "it's a problem on Twitter's end, they're tracking it down now" and they suggest that anyone who gets this error sends their IP address to contact@atebits.com.
First, I don't believe the problem is on Twitter's end. If it was, other iPhone Twitter app would have the same issue. Second, how am I supposed to email them my IP address when the problem mostly appears over 3G, which means I have a different IP address every time I make a data connection?
This problem has been going on for the past few weeks and it seems it's getting worse. It's really disappointing that Ate Bits, the developers of Tweetie, are not taking a more proactive role in this matter. I don't expect much from a free app, but when I pay $3 for an application, I expect it to work flawlessly.
Have you guys encountered this issue as well? If you don't use Tweetie, what Twitter application do you use? Is your iPhone jailbroken?
Update: Looking a the reactions on Twitter, it is clear that this problem also appears on other Twitter apps. My apologies to Ate Bits for thinking they were not doing their best. The problems does seem to come from Twitter itself after all.