Following my review of Letterpress, I sat down with Loren Brichter to chat about his latest effort, developing for iOS, other mobile platforms, and spitting into microphones. In reality, I was still in Italy and our interview was conducted on Skype, but Loren says the part about spitting was real.

Federico: Hey Loren, thanks for chatting with me today. Firstly, so we can get this out of the way: why a game?

Loren Brichter: When I left Twitter I started working on a whole slew of projects that I hadn’t had time to work on since Tweetie took off.

One of them was a game (not Letterpress), which was a testbed for some graphics ideas I was kicking around. It was pretty close to finished, just needed some more polish and content. But around that time I went out to dinner with my wife, and while we were waiting for a table, we were both playing this other (totally awesome) word game called SpellTower. But it was single player only, and I figured I could try my hand at a multiplayer word game. So I dropped the first game, and made this instead. (more…)

Loren Brichter’s comeback app isn’t a Twitter client, something that works with Tent.io, or a revolutionary implementation of multitouch on the iPad.

It’s a word game. It’s called Letterpress, and it’s available for free on the App Store. I’ve been able to beta test it for a while, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite games on iOS. One I instantly reach out to whenever I have 5 minutes to kill.

Letterpress is similar to SpellTower, but it’s focused on multiplayer and has deeply different rules when it comes to assembling words. (more…)

The original Tweetie for Mac — the app that went on to become Tweetie 2 or “Twitter for Mac — stopped working today. Twitter cut access to the API endpoint that allowed for it to work, thus effectively “killing” the app for those who were still using it.

Matthew Panzarino writes:

Tweetie for Mac came about on April 20, 2009, and it brought along its own set of UI paradigms that propagated throughout Mac app design culture. The sidebar navigation, for instance, is probably in use on whatever Twitter client you’ve got installed. The ‘nipple’ that indicates the current position on the navigation bar is also a Brichter invention, and now exists in hundreds of apps like Google+, Instapaper and dozens more. It eventually found its way to Tweetie 2 for iPhone as well.

To me, Tweetie was more than an .app bundle available from /Applications in the Finder. It represents a period of my life that I cherish every day.

I joined Twitter in February 2009. As I said, I was jobless at the time. I thought I could try my hand at writing about Apple and Macs, and my girlfriend said “go for it”.

On April 20, 2009, MacStories and Tweetie were born.

Today, we kiss Tweetie goodbye. MacStories and my girlfriend are still around, and my relationship with them is better than ever. I didn’t realize this back when we celebrated the site’s third birthday — that MacStories and Tweetie for Mac launched on the same day.

Tweetie and I had our ups and downs. I loved the app, but I became frustrated with the multiple delays version 2.0 was seeing. I wrote some things about Loren that I’m not proud of. Years later, I apologized to him, but I’m keeping those posts online to remember that sometimes I can be wrong, and ridiculously so. In late 2010, Loren was so gracious to let me beta-test “Tweetie 2.0″, which was launched as Twitter for Mac on the App Store. I used that app until Tweetbot for Mac came out. Loren moved on with his life and left Twitter; I, behind my keyboard, picked a different Twitter client.

I guess, in a way, this site owes much of its success to Tweetie for Mac. I woudn’t have been able to get to know developers, friends, colleagues, and readers if it weren’t for Twitter. If it weren’t for Tweetie, which to me, was Twitter.

I remember using Tweetie all the time. Sometimes I would go days without closing it, keeping it open because I was “looking for news” or trying to get into some new beta of an upcoming iPhone app. Other times I would close Twitter during the night, because, back in the “old days”, Twitter clients — not even Tweetie — had good timeline gap detection.

Tweetie set standards and inspired other developers to create new apps. It won awards, and it marked the starting point of a new era of third-party OS X development.

For me and many others, Tweetie defined Twitter.

Goodbye, Tweetie. Our community is better because of you.

Circling around on the internet over the last few days has been the news that there is a patent application for the “pull-to-refresh” feature that Loren Brichter pioneered in Tweetie and is now an extremely popular UI gesture used in a lot of iOS, Mac and Android apps. Twitter holds the patent application, not Brichter who recently left Twitter after they acquired him and Tweetie a few years ago. It’s also important to note that the patent has not yet been granted, it is simply a patent application at this point in time.

Featured in the latest One More Thing podcast (a tie-in to the Australian iOS conference we wrote about last week, featuring many of the speakers), Brichter briefly talks about the patent (note that this was actually recorded before the news about the patent spread wildly on the internet) and says:

… I can’t talk about the specifics but Twitter owns the patent, but I don’t think people have anything to worry about.

Brichter also describes the design process that resulted in the “pull-to-refresh” feature being implemented in the episode. He talks about how in Tweetie 1.0 the refresh button would be on top of all your tweets because there wasn’t enough room on the navbar because of a back button and compose tweets button. But for Tweetie 2, Brichter thought he could “make it a little simpler” so that you didn’t have to scroll to the top, lift your finger and tap on the refresh button, instead he asked the question:

…why not just make refreshing part of the scroll gesture itself? So it was kind of an obvious extension of a simple idea.

The whole episode is certainly worth a listen, Brichter offers some great insights on development and his experiences as both an independent developer and a developer working in a large team (like he did for Twitter and Apple).

Thanks to Stuart Hall for the heads up.

Since Loren Brichter first implemented the popular “pull to refresh” functionality in Tweetie 2 for iPhone, lots of other developers were inspired by him to do the same in their apps. Hundreds of other Twitter clients can do “pull to refresh”. Even the official Facebook app has pull to refresh. Now Apple’s Mail app for iPhone can, too. (more…)