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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 iPhone App: Quento is a spelling game, but with math
Quento was recommended to me just recently by someone I met at Macworld or 360iDev, and unfortunately, I don't remember who told me about it. But the recommendation was great, and now I'm passing it on to you. As you can see above, Quento is a math-based puzzle game, where you use a grid of numbers and symbols to try and put them together into a target number. The game's interface is actually half the fun -- like the popular word game Letterpress, Quento is very stylishly designed, and as you complete each target number in the puzzle, it gets replaced in the menu above. You can swipe the little menu right or left to go up to harder difficulty modes, or down to a "free play" mode (where you just get a number to make, and you can use any combination to make it). The game is casual, obviously, but it's not necessarily easy -- at times, I found myself racking my brain to try and line the numbers up right. But there's always an answer in there, and no matter what your math knowledge is like, Quento does a great job of rewarding concentration and smart gameplay. You can pick it up now as a free, universal app.
Apple announces the App Store's Best of 2012
Apple has posted its top picks for the entire year of 2012 in the App Store, and you can browse through all of the choices right now. On the iPhone, Action Movie FX has picked up the App of the Year award, and Ubisoft's Rayman Jungle Run has earned game of the year, with music app Figure and social word game Letterpress picking up the runner up slots. Over on the iPad, FiftyThree's Paper has won app of the year, and the spooky The Room has earned game of the year, with Action Movie FX's iPad version and Tiger Style's great Waking Mars as runner-ups there. There are also a ton of great apps listed in other various categories, and Apple has also listed the top downloaded (Angry Birds Space has nailed both top spots in paid) and top grossing apps in each category. Obviously, with any list like this, there are some favorites missing (and if you want to see TUAW's choices, follow along with our own Best of 2012 coverage). But it's definitely been a great and busy year on the App Store, and Apple's collection is chock full of very well-done apps and games for sure.
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."
atebits releases Letterpress for iPhone
With the release of Letterpress today for the iPhone and iPad, dictionary divers will have yet another word game where they can show off their skills. Letterpress is the new project from atebits, Loren (Tweetie) Brichter's development shop. The game takes place on a seemingly randomly generated series of tiles, where two players -- connected via Game Center only -- take turns coming up with words using only the letters provided. The game adds a good bit of strategy by allowing players to "protect" a tile by using it as well as all of the letters bordering it. The opposing player is then prohibited from using scoring the protected letter in their own words. The game ends when either all of the tiles have been played at least once or when both players run out of words to play. If you consider yourself a wordsmith and want to give Letterpress a try, it's free on the App Store right now, though you'll need to pay for the $0.99 upgrade if you want to unlock more visual themes and keep several games going at one time.
