Mercifully, the Direct Messages still make an appearance in the main timeline, but now have a more traditional threaded structure. This means that you get brightly colored replies interleaved with your mentions, but are able to see them as a separate section as well. Twitterrific’s unified timeline makes a reappearance here, but thankfully the last version’s dedicated mentions tab remains. This can be viewed from the point of the tweet on (replies) or all tweets in the conversation at once. You can add a location or an image here and a clever shortcut allows you to long-press on the image box to add the last picture taken automatically.Ī swipe to the left brings up the conversation view, letting you see the thread that the tweet is a part of. This eliminates a dozen or more extraneous icons that appear by default in many clients, allowing the text to stand front and center.Ī swipe to the right activates a beautiful reply card that features the text of the tweet you’re replying to for context and plenty of composition space. By default, the interface features few buttons aside from compose, a menu and three section buttons for navigating Twitter.Įven the buttons that allow you to reply, re-tweet, favorite or access things like translating are hidden by default. The new Twitterrrific features a stream of mostly unadorned tweets floating on a bed of deep black, popping in bright, pleasant colors with well-chosen fonts. And it’s stuff that we can learn from and apply to our other applications.”Īnd those ideas centered around stripping down the interface of the app to place the tweets front and center. Lanham says that they had some “pretty nervous moments during development,” but they knew that they had to get the concepts that they had for Twitterrific out the door. “We were really excited by the mockups and comps that we had done. It turned out ok, which was lucky for us.” Committing to it without actually knowing what was going to happen. “Especially when you’ve built a good chunk of your company’s livelihood around this product that uses Twitter. That was the really stressful part. “It definitely is stressful, to say the least,” says Maheux. Maheux says that he’s not sure that Iconfactory would be releasing Twitterrific 5 at all if not for that. It can accomodate up to double the users that it currently supports, giving it space to grow. I spoke to Iconfactory designers Gedeon Maheux and David Lanham about the development process, and soldiering on despite the worsening atmosphere.Īs Twitterrific for iOS existed before the rules went into place, the app has a lot more wiggle room when it comes to maximum users. This means making it a far more hostile place for developers by restricting the number of users that any one Twitter client can have and pruning away bits of that formerly powerful API that it doesn’t want people playing with.Īnd all of this was happening while Twitterrrific 5 was being developed. Twitter has decided that the best way forward for it is to collect and control the ways that users view tweets and other information shared on the network.

Now, nearly six years since the first version of Twitterrific was released - and after nearly a year of work - Twitterrific 5 makes its debut in a very different environment for Twitter developers. Among these is the use of a bird to represent Twitter (Iconfactory calls him Ollie), the first use of the word ‘tweet’, the first in-app implementation of replies and conversations and a bunch of other stuff. The material contributions of the app to the Twitter ecosystem are documented in a short list of ‘ Twitterrific firsts‘. Eventually it would include Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry, Gedeon Maheux and David Lanham Loren Brichter, of Tweetie for iOS and Mac, which Twitter would later go on to acquire and later others like Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine of Tweetbot.īut The Iconfactory, more than many other developers, helped to define the Twitter experience through its beautiful and unique Twitterrific.

Twitter had a developer ecosystem building for it that is essentially unmatched. That interface and the challenge of bringing form to Twitter was enough for The Iconfactory to begin work on Twitterrific. And they weren’t alone. This was facilitated by an application programming interface that Twitter provided which allowed easy access to reading and writing Twitter data. The development of third-party apps, especially on mobile devices, ended up being the catalyst for Twitter’s growth as a product.

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