Much Ado About Much Ado About Twitter
So he starts off all rational.
Gruber’s eighteen page missive on what is wrong with the new Twitter is kind of perplexing. It’s not that his specific complaints aren’t valid, but he wraps them up with “the way that I use Twitter is the right way, and Twitter doesn’t care about me” despite saying this:
The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it.
Yeah, and that’s how Twitter works to this day. A “Discover” button you think is useless isn’t going to undo your ability to use the service the same way you describe—which happens to be the same way everyone else uses Twitter and is still using Twitter despite this update.
It’s pretty clear that Gruber is referring to why he doesn’t like the revised Twitter app. But keep going with those knee-jerk reactions, because they build character.
The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content.
Jesus, Gruber is acting like the Discover tab is being opened automatically every time you load the app. It’s not. It’s just there, and apparently it preys on his subconscious so severely that he can’t get away from it. Also, we’re seeing the typical Gruber-vitriol directed toward any company that isn’t Apple trying to monetize their wares, which I’ll always find peculiar. Shame on you, Twitter!
No, he’s arguing that their method of monetisation is obnoxious, as he did in March when it was introduced, while linking to Marco Arment’s post. He also points out that standard behaviour is to put a “More…” tab at the bottom and allow reorganisation of items. The Discover tab, for him, is a waste of space and he’d prefer something like Direct Messages instead. At least, that’s the way I read his critique.
It’s an attempt at a best way to do Twitter that is as consistent as possible across multiple platforms, ranging from the iPhone to Android to the mobile and desktop web. I don’t want an iPhone app that’s constrained by the restrictions of a mobile web app.
Sorry Gruber, iOS is no longer a unique snowflake that gets preferential treatment. The same Twitter app that works for Android can work for iOS. That last sentence especially confuses me: what about the new iPhone app is more restrictive than the one that came before it? All the same features are there. It’s not “constrained” by the restrictions of a web app, I’m not even sure where you would get that idea.
[…]
Personally I’m just happy that double tapping the “Home” button jumps to the top of the list of tweets, because I got used to that behavior on Android and it makes sense to me, more than tapping on my phone’s status bar does. I’m assuming because this is unorthodox behavior in the iOS world, Gruber hates it, and it doesn’t matter how useful it is to you, me, or anyone else.
Cross-platform is cool. It enables developers to update apps and fix bugs a lot easier. But the apps should fit into the conventions of each OS they’re deployed to.
Consider Adobe. They like to ship essentially the same shit to customers on both Mac and Windows. It shows in just how terrible their miserably faked user interfaces are.
Twitter for iPhone should look like it belongs on the iPhone, not like it’s a port of the Android app. Conversely, the Android Twitter app should adopt that platform’s conventions in terms of UI, behaviour, and all the rest of it. The reason double-tapping home to return to the top is bad isn’t because Gruber hates it, but because (like you said) it’s unorthodox. It doesn’t belong on the platform, and shoehorning another platform’s conventions onto an established one is messy, unnecessary and redundant. Also, this shortcut is completely undiscoverable. On the plus side, it isn’t like they removed the standard shortcut of tapping the title bar.
Then again, that shortcut doesn’t work in the mobile Twitter site because it’s an iframe or something crappy like that.
(via johngruber)
Source: daringfireball.net
