loren brichter
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WSJ profiles Letterpress creator Loren Brichter, the 'high priest of app design'
Here at TUAW, we're big fans of Loren Brichter, the app developer behind Tweetie (which eventually became the official Twitter app) and the great word game Letterpress. But the Wall Street Journal appears to have just discovered the dev -- in a profile that appeared over the weekend, the paper calls him a "high priest of app design and an increasingly influential tastemaker." It's true, Brichter and his designs have been lauded by devs, users and even Apple. His Tweetie app originated the "pull to refresh" idea (where you pull a list down off the top of the screen to refresh it from the servers), since implemented by Facebook, Pinterest and Apple itself. Brichter also helped innovate with side menus (as seen in the Facebook app), as well as what the WSJ calls the "cell swipe," where you can swipe across a list item to reveal more controls and buttons. The WSJ says that Brichter is now working on "an arcade game," something that will require him to build out more of his own technology. In general, it sounds like Brichter's got the freedom (and the willpower) to just take it easy and do what he wants to do -- he freely offers advice to other developers, and even says that he's happy to see other people use features he's designed, "as long as they aren't a d---." As high priests go, we're happy to have Brichter helping lead the cult of Mac.
Daily Update for December 4, 2012
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Loren Brichter and the future of iOS apps
GigaOM had a wonderful post about Loren Brichter yesterday. In case you're scratching your head and saying "Who is Loren Brichter?", you may have seen some of his work without even knowing it. Brichter is a 28 year-old developer and designer -- and the only employee of Atebits -- who worked for Apple during the development of the iPhone, and the brains behind the wildly popular Letterpress two-player word game. Any time you use the "rubber-banding" gesture, "pulling down" the top of an iOS app page to refresh it, you're using a bit of Brichter's genius. In the post, Brichter mentions that Letterpress is an "insane" experiment with the future of displaying graphics on a mobile device. Brichter built his own version of the UI framework, and now has millions of people testing his code via the word game. Unlike many young developers who complain about today's iOS and OS X development environments and how hard it is to get noticed in the App Stores, Brichter thinks new devs have it rather easy, saying "someone nowadays has all of these tools available, like Cocos2D, GitHub, StackOverflow; they can get on the App Store and get exposed to millions of people." Brichter's happy about Jony Ive being named as Apple's senior VP of Industrial Design, saying that "he's true to the materials, to the medium he's working in. One of my complaints about design of iOS is it's doing things that aren't true to the hardware." As such, Brichter designed Letterpress to "do things that the graphics hardware was really good at." Brichter says he'll continue to work on Letterpress and "use it as a testbed for more stuff." When it comes to future projects, though, he says he'd "like to focus more on infrastructure" before working on one of his "thousand half-baked product ideas."
Breaking: Twitter acquires Tweetie, will make it official and free
Twitter founder Evan Williams has posted on the official blog that the company will be buying Tweetie, an iPhone app currently available in the App Store, from creator Loren Brichter. The app will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and released in the App Store for free. Williams says that Twitter users have looked for an official app in the store and haven't found one, so he says that they hope to solve that problem by providing an official App Store location for Twitter. Brichter will be joining the Twitter team, and he'll be working with them to eventually provide a Twitter for iPad app as well. More information on the deal (as well as that price change) is coming soon, though Williams didn't say when the iPad app might be released. So, wow. A little shakeup in one of the biggest app genres on the iPhone. There's no word yet on what will happen to the Mac version of Tweetie, or any other plans Brichter might have for the App Store. Here's a statement from him. Stay tuned for more insight and analysis soon.
Apple stupidly rejects Tweetie 1.3 for foul language in Twitter trends
Apple's just reached a whole new level of stupidity in App Store approval shenanigans: the Tweetie 1.3 update was just rejected for displaying "offensive language" in its Twitter trend search view. Right, not for offensive language in the app itself, but for offensive language on Twitter -- an insanely strict new standard that could conceivably be used to reject each and every iPhone Twitter client out there. (And if you haven't noticed, there are quite a few iPhone Twitter clients.) Hell, Apple might as well reject the next versions of Safari and Mail, since they can display dirty words too -- and let's not forget the awful things people are doing with Notes and the camera. Better lock it down. Look, Apple -- this is a nadir. Rejecting a Twitter client for Twitter's content is simply indefensible, and it's a sign that the App Store approval "process" is broken beyond repair. It's time to drop the seemingly-random black-box approach -- which has earned nothing but well-deserved scorn -- open up, establish consistent, easy-to-understand rules with a well-defined appeals process, and actually work with innovative developers like Tweetie's Loren Brichter to push your platform forward in the face of newly-stiff competition. The massive popularity of the iPhone and the App Store may prevent a mass exodus, but the best devs are going to leave if they feel jerked around, and we doubt a store full of fart apps and misogynistic jiggle apps is really the vision you had for your platform. Think about it. [via The iPhone Blog]
