Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 3:31PM Do you ever get the feeling that an application has too many unavailing options?
While some choice is good, in this case the designer may be going too far:
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 1:29AM It isn't the lack of a camera, multi-tasking or Flash. It isn't the lack of freedom due to the closed ecosystem. It isn't the lack of wireless syncing or video out. It isn't the screen's display resolution nor is it that the screen might not be the best for reading from.
It's this:
Who decided the iTunes 9 team was allowed to design software on another device?
Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 7:05PM While looking around at web developer hints and tips, you'll often read of people's love for Firefox and Firebug as if that's the pinnacle of debugging. Well, they're wrong.
Firebug has always seemed slow, buggy and not exactly easy to navigate. An example of this is that while writing this post, I examined Firebug to check that I wasn't missing something and while Firebug does have some of the features I describe below, they aren't located on the Script tab.
One of my favourite rendering engines, WebKit, has its own set of debugging tools know has as the Inspector. The Inspector has one of my favourite features in any Javascript debugging software, a REPL.
When you have the Inspector open, click the second button in from the bottom left and you'll be given an area to type in. This is the Javascript REPL and one of many things that I love about WebKit.
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As you can see from this example, it also features syntax autocompletion of both javascript APIs and variable names.
This has been especially helpful when coding for Twitterfall. Recently, we've been focusing on reimplementing areas of the code to make it more efficient and have a lower footprint.
Sometimes, you just need to be able to test whether writing a function a specific way will give you the output you want. On these occasions it's so nice to be able to open the Inspector and just start typing.
Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 7:30PM While working at Twitterfall, we've been developing a new iPhone application to replace the current one. This will be released as an update with no extra cost. During this time, I've been doing some market research and looking into the other iPhone apps. I'd like to comment on the following apps:
Echofon, Tweetie, Twitterific Premium, Twittelator Pro, Tweetdeck, Birdfeed and Echofon Pro. While Birdhouse is on the list, I couldn't think of anything to say about it. There's just not enough there.
Birdfeed
Birdfeed has several features that I absolutely adore. First of all, it's very pretty. The tweet view is very pretty, although scrolling can lag slightly.
When viewing your own tweets, you have the ability to delete them. This is a feature that many Twitter clients seem to ignore. One of my favourite features in this app is from when you close a tweet midway through writing it. In other Twitter clients this tweet would be disregarded, or left in the tweet box for next time. However, Birdfeed notifies you that a tweet has been partially written by using the icon placed below. Many Mac users will recognise this concept, and it is very welcoming to see it.
These draft tweets are even saved across each account.
Echofon was one of the first iPhone apps that I really started to use. Since then, it's added adverts, which I can understand. While the need to differentiate between a premium version and a standard version is necessary, i'm not fully sure that this was the best option, even if it is very effective (I bought the premium version).
One thing I've started to really dislike about Echofon is the invention of a forward button in the title bar. The idea of taking an existing UI element and changing it into something you need does seem sensible, but you have to wonder why Apple haven't done it themselves nor anybody else. The button below looks odd, and doesn't exactly match the back buttons that the shape is usually associated with. As well as this, the button also has two lines of text which isn't consistent with a navigation controller's back button. Thank you to @miketomasello for pointing out how wrong I was.
The premium version of Echofon really disappoints me. The additional features just don't seem to be anything I really care about. The main reason to upgrade is to remove the advertising, which in-itself is probably worth the upgrade. The other main two features are push notifications and multi-account support.
The multi-account feature is accessed by tapping the, now grey, navigation bar. The decision to move to grey was, in my opinion, a bad one. The blue was very nice, and gave the application a friendliness that I really enjoyed. The new darker navigation bar is depressing.
The second major premium feature is push notifications. I've never used push notifications on my iPhone, I just don't see the need for it. It uses up battery due to the extra connection, and just doesn't seem that necessary when I'm connected nearly all the time anyway.
Another feature that appears in the premium version, is the ability to sync unread tweets between the different version of Echofon. If you use Echofon for Mac or Echofon for Firefox, then Echofon will sync the last tweet that you read to its cloud. Then when you come to view the tweets on another device/client, you'll be able to keep up from where you left off.
Tweetie's main design decision seems to be "How much of this can we write ourselves?". You'll notice a lot of custom elements within the application. For example, the tab bar at the bottom of your timeline or the "drop down" menus when you press something like "Services".
While a lot of the custom controllers are very pretty, and make you say "Wow" the first time you see them, they don't replace the idea of good design which will make you say "Wow" every time. Some of the elements make you think "Why is it like that?", not "Why would it be any other way?".
Notwithstanding, Tweetie is the most popular Twitter application for the iPhone and for good reason. A lot of innovation originally came from the application with its simple design and snappy response, but I think this might be leading to an over-complicated Twitter client with lots of flashy gimmicks to ensure that users remained excited.
The attributes that immediately spring to mind when people mention Tweetdeck are that it's very heavy and very dark.
So, what's the iPhone app like? Well, it's very heavy and very dark.
The application also features its own notification system, for reasons that are beyond me. Tweetdeck's developers seem to have followed Tweetie when it comes to writing sections of their iPhone application. In Tweetdeck's case, they've rewritten the tab bar to make accessing each type of tweet difficult and therefore requiring a new way to notify users rather than buttoning a tab bar item.
Tweetdeck also seems to have one of the worst hacks of all these iPhone applications. On the tab bar, there is a button label More. Upon pressing this button a bar appears with, what was originally one, two buttons. One of the buttons is Quick Follow, when you press this an alert dialog appears asking you to type in a username.
Twitterific, like Tweetdeck is another application that feels very heavy. It lags while scrolling, as well as many other operations. It features a Sources page that contains such items as Public Timeline, the Trends and Quick Search. Selecting Quick Search leads you to the following page:
As you can see, this pane is a little long and not quite as quick as the name suggests.
Once you're looking at tweets, the interface gets more confusing. The toolbar contains 5 icons that aren't really obvious as to their meaning.
The first two are reasonably understandable, referring to a refresh button and a compose tweet button. However, the other three are slightly ambiguous. The middle icon appears to give you access to some of your account's followers, following users and recently seen. The greyed out icon is a favourite star. Upon pressing a tweet, you can favourite it by then pressing this icon. The final button appears to be a funnel, which suggests to me that it's some kind of in-page filter or search. Upon pressing this, another toolbar shows up with access to @replies, direct messages, favourites (using a different star to the one for favouriting tweets), tweets from myself and marked tweets.
I won't say too much about Twittelator Pro, because I think that a lot of what I'm going to say is summed up in the image below. One of the main issues I have with this application is when you're viewing tweets. To view information about that particular tweet or the user, you have to tap the tweeter's username. This isn't immediately obvious.
A lot of the tap gestures while viewing tweets has also been removed. The traditional functionality of tapping at the top of the screen has been replaced from scrolling to the top, to scrolling up 3 tweets. This is very annoying when you have a large number of tweets and want to see what's happening right now. Double tapping on the main tweet view scrolls up 3 tweets also. So if you weren't sure on how to copy and paste a tweet, since you don't just press the tweet row, you would double tap over the text and end up scrolling.
Finally, the settings pane lags when you're scrolling it. But how could a settings pane lag, you ask? The settings pane is shown below. It's approximately 9 pages of scrolling.
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