When you have nothing better to say, blog about Twitter. Apologies in advance, I do not mean this to be yet another meta post about microblogging, I got tired of this meme right when it started and don’t mean to inflict that punishment on you. But I do want to take some time to point out good (and not so stellar) UI decisions, and what could be better than a few free apps you can test against a service you probably already use.
So I’m going to chronicle my very short history with alternative clients, before picking three and contrasting them. This is not meant to be exhaustive, just another post written over a cup of coffee. Just a personal point of view, and I’d like to hear your experience in the comments.
A Brief History of My Experience
Twitterific. I heard so many good things about it from so many people who Twitter so frequently, that when I finally made the switch to the Mac it was one of the first apps I installed.
What a beautiful app. Motivated me to go back to Twittering.Lasted all of a week. The app, I continued Twittering but switched back to use the Web site. Twitterific is very attractive, just not the right material for long term relationships.I’m still trying to figure out why I can’t get along with the UI. Any ideas?
Twhirl. More controls than a 747 cockpit, all made out of impossibly small targets. Not a great fit for a 13″ display and touchpad. Lasted an hour.
Twitter w/Fluid. Because I have too many open tabs, and the Web site just works, so it’s just a matter of running it outside Firefox. Simple combination that lasted for months.
Twinkle. One of the more interesting apps for the Jailbroken iPhone.Mostly good, occasionally annoying, and makes novel use of the location service. In fact, location was the killer feature.
Twitterific (round two). Upgrade to 2.0 disabled Twinkle, to the rescue came Twitterific. Not just a replica of the desktop app, this one was clearly designed to play to the strengths of the iPhone, with some interesting UI elements.
Unfortunately, like its desktop sibling, we never got a long. I got disoriented trying to follow other people’s tweets and left it after a few days.
Twinkle (round two). Next to show up in the AppStore, new and improved, but unfortunately distance did not make the heart grow fonder, and the location novelty wore off. Not by much, but enough to make room for a new affair.
Still keeping it around, great for war twitting: checking tweets from small towns you pass through on a road trip.
Hahlo. Finally, one to bring home to mom. Well, at least a relationship that’s lasting into its third week and still going strong. Right now I’m using it exclusively on the iPhone, the Web-based UI works better than anything else (ok, there are a few bugs, but they’re reasonable). Also using it exclusively on he desktop as a Fluid app with Growl notifications.
What I Learned Form Watching What I Use
So why Hahlo and not any of the other usual suspects? I spent the last couple of days watching my usage of it, noting things down, and here’s what I came up with.
The simplicity of a Web app. There are some things you just can’t do outside a native app, for everything else, they’re just a waste of time. They’re hidden from the Web and walled inside iTunes/AppStore, take forever to install and require scheduled maintenance. Coincidentally, I ended up “installing” Hahlo by following a link from a Twitter post, without ever leaving the browser.
AJAX done right. A great Web app uses persistent, readable URLs for every interesting resource. Twitter does that, so it’s pretty easy to share links to people, statuses and other points of interest. Hahlo hides the entire user interface behind a single URL, but it works extremely well because Hahlo is just a front end, Twitter is the system of record. If I need to link, I wouldn’t be using Hahlo links anyway (although link discovery is missing in the current version).
The most important features first. As far as I could tell, you could do just about anything through the Hahlo UI, including changing your location, un(follow)ing people, even deleting your own tweets. (I didn’t even know that was possible before using Hahlo) That’s all stuff I hardly ever do and don’t really care to see in the UI, so don’t show it to me. Hahlo smartly hides these features behind the pop-up menu, and when clicking on a profile image. The only features readily present are the mythical 20% I use all the time, but everything else is easy to discover with a single click.
Readability over style. The main interface is black over white, with white over black ribbon at the top. I personally think that black backgrounds make any UI look more profession, and on first impression find noir clients like Twitterific and Twinkle more appealing. But day to day, text reads better over dark background.
Differentiate but don’t confuse. When it refreshes with new messages, it scrolls to the top and shows the new messages against an off-white background. Not my favorite choice of color, but helps distinguish unread messages apart. That, and clicking refresh takes you back to the top while clearing the new-to-you background.
At least one other client had the clever-and-half idea of scrolling me to the halfway point between new and previously seen messages. It sounds good in theory (take me to where the action is), but ended up confusing me to no end. My mental model is to start from the top and scan to the bottom, and anything else just messes with that.
Preserve linear flow. Several times a day I’ll bump into a tweet that responds to another. In the past that meant clicking the @ link, scrolling down the list (some people are chatty!) to figure out which message was replied to. That’s exactly how hypermedia is meant to work, except that I scan my timeline linearly and it just breaks the flow. Hahlo takes that workflow and bakes it into the main timeline, exposing the replied-to message under the reply. It’s a very simple, single-level threaded conversation device which is just good enough (in fact, I don’t think I need more than that).
Don’t reinvent that which already works. Two novel and utterly annoying features of Twitterific (possibly fixed since I last used it). Every link opens in their custom browser, instead of taking me over to Safari. Updating over EDGE, it takes forever for Twitterific to download all the profile icons, even though most messages are posted by a handful of chatty people. Ironically the Web apps are much snappier to populate the page, probably because they didn’t have to re-invent, and get wrong, the image loading mechanism that’s already built into Safari.
My needs ahead of yours. As far as I can tell, Hahlo’s “business model” is being a resume for its author, in which case it’s one of the best resumes I’ve seen. Dean J Robinson clearly knows what it’s doing (also tipjar). It doesn’t try to lock me in. Twitterific has a business model, I can see myself paying if I actually liked it, but I also get a sense it’s trying to be a platform. I’m not sure where Twinkle is headed, other than I need to have a Twitter and Twinkle account, which are separately maintained. I’m at best guessing, but it feels like in both cases “let’s make it a business” design decision got in the way of “let’s make it useful”. Always a mistake.
Try It Yourself
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but since all these tools are freely available, and you probably have a Twitter account to experiment with, you can try them all out and make up your own mind. I think it’s a worthwhile exercise, a lot of practices and UI decisions worth picking up by personally noting what works and what doesn’t.
Which one do you like best, and why?
Head On » Blog Archive » Separating the View And the API