8 ms·

Twitter’s updated Mac app wasn’t made by Twitter

155 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

jasonlbaptiste 11y ago
Why? This doesn't make logical sense. It's a large company with enough resources. I get that the Mac is a lower priority, but why put your name on anything this bad. It's pretty clear how you should approach this: a) We're going to do this and we'll do it right. It might be a smaller audience, but if we release this product under our name it will be awesome. b) This isn't a priority, so we're not going to ship something half baked and outsource it. Here's a link to TweetDeck and TweetBot.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  > but why put your name on anything this bad It's possible that someone signed a bad contract. I've seen terrible products worked on or released because certain rights were sold in ways they shouldn't have been sold. That's not an excuse as it should still never happen. But it can go down that way.
  - jasonlbaptiste 11y ago
    Totally, but even if it was say a 500k contract, you chalk it up as a loss and don't release it.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Sounds like a case where the incentives for the company don't line up with the incentives for an individual manager. The responsible person might have suffered greatly (or at least thought they would) if they had just declared that much money to be a lesson learned on a bad idea, even if that might have been best for Twitter.
- morgante 11y ago
  > b) This isn't a priority, so we're not going to ship something half baked and outsource it. Here's a link to TweetDeck and TweetBot. Since the API now effectively forbids third party apps, that doesn't seem like a viable option.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    TweetDeck hasn't been third party since Twitter acquired it in 2011.
    - morgante 11y ago
      Oh, in that case I completely agree. They should have just rebranded TweetDeck as the new official Twitter OS X client.
      - ChrisClark 11y ago
        The old Twitter app for OS X wasn't theirs either, they just bought and re-branded Tweetie. So they could have re-branded TweetDeck even more easily.
perseusprime122 11y ago
Lack of skill set. Twitter mostly has good backend engineers and never really focused on building a strong front end engineering and UX organizations.
- agiamas 11y ago
  I don't agree. As an example: Bootstrap, by Twitter - http://bootstrapdocs.com/v2.0.2/docs/ http://bootstrapdocs.com/v2.0.2/docs/
perseusprime122 11y ago
Lack of skills, and speed to market are two reasons I can think of
rocky1138 11y ago
Why don't people just go to https://twitter.com https://twitter.com in their web browser instead?
- dilap 11y ago
  as a tweetbot* user, i can tell you that for me the native experience is way better than a web page. edit: tweetBOT, not DECK, and we regret the error! *tho it has which has its own frustrations, and totally apathetic devs :'(
- jfb 11y ago
  Some people hate web apps.
- cballard 11y ago
  Ads and general horribleness that is the Twitter UI, although that's an argument for using Tweetbot, not the bad official Twitter apps.
- mikeash 11y ago
  The browser has a lot of window chrome I don't need. The browser window doesn't easily resize to a natural size for Twitter use. The browser either won't remember the size, or it will remember too well and start trying to apply that size to new windows that aren't meant for Twitter. The browser won't put an icon in my menu bar to show when new stuff has arrived. The twitter.com window will be mixed in with the others, so cycling through them with cmd-` will be annoying. Conversely, getting to that window specifically will require more work to find it among the others. Basically, this is a microcosm of why people use native apps at all. The answer is pretty much always "they work a lot better."
  - oblio 11y ago
    The real question: why don't browsers support all of that through a new web standard? None of that is rocket science.
    - 11y ago
danielrakh 11y ago
I think this project was put into works > 1 year ago. It's obvious it wasn't designed to incorporate Moments, the no character limit for DM's and Polls (all new features from 2015). Building out a Mac app shouldn't be a top priority of any company today, unless you're into productivity (i.e. Sketch, Adobe). I'm almost sure that Twitter was stretched thin with Obj-c/Swift engineers building out the iPad app and refreshing the iPhone app (Moments) this past year.
santaclaus 11y ago
I've seen one person Mac shops put out apps of way more complexity than a Twitter client -- could Twitter seriously not hire a single native Mac dev?
- krschultz 11y ago
  I'm not familiar with Twitter, but I've been in this situation before elsewhere. An independent developer can bang out a good enough clone for the app that works in 85% of the use cases. Most users would never know the parts that are broken. An internal developer can't ship that app. The 15% of the cases where it doesn't match the desired business intent torpedo shipping it. Keep in mind the alternative option to the native app is using the web app which likely works in 99% of cases. It's unacceptable to whatever section of the company doesn't have their feature in the native app (but do in the web app) to 'lose' users. Of course that last 15% of the features leads to a doubling of complexity.
  - smackfu 11y ago
    For instance, none of the third-party Twitter apps show ads. And that's exactly the part of the app that would have a lot of A/B testing and new features.
- nathanvanfleet 11y ago
  I thought they had a dozen devs on the iOs client. Amazingly.
rubyn00bie 11y ago
Two thoughts from this, first about this in general. Second is in regards to some comments I'm seeing posted here: 1.) I am surprised this doesn't happen more. You find a company that's excited to build it, let them run with it, then if it ever becomes a target you acquihire. 2.) Folks internally probably know a Mac app isn't a target. Thus, who would want to work on it? There are probably loads of more exciting projects that'll get recognition. It's not that they can't, it's that no one there (really) wants to...
- alanh 11y ago
  Not bad for guesswork, as you are correct management never wanted to prioritize it, but w.r.t. devs, you are off the mark. Internally there have always been those who wanted to work for it. I have been privately told (in late October 2015) by a former Twitter employee who is, shall we say, intimately familiar with Twitter/Mac: > Twitter has always seemed to hate the idea of a Mac app and has either tried to kill it or let it rot. At this point I think 3 generations of rogue devs inside the company have basically had to sneak around management to work on it. > Interesting to see them publicly announce an update. Rumor is they've completely outsourced development though.
  - rubyn00bie 11y ago
    Thanks for the info! Interesting management was contemptuous of it. I wouldn't have expected that. Though with that said, I'd like to lay a bit more guesswork down now. Those devs were probably good, I'd guess too good (for these purposes), and that management wanted them focused on core products which serve their target better... Like iOS? So it is probably less about contempt for the Mac product and more about the best usage of resources. I have a feeling the rogues at Twitter who want to work on this are in a pretty high pay grade, even compared to the folks at the shop that made it. So it even still probably saved money. With all that, has Twitter made the best use of those developer resources? I have no clue.
    - guelo 11y ago
      I wonder what would happen if one of these large internet companies with top engineering talent would fire all their product managers and designers. That's how Google worked back when they had their period of highest innovation.
cbeach 11y ago
Far too much wasted space in the new UI - between icons, tweets etc. I used to be able to see all my accounts on the left-hand navigation bar, and now I can't because the increased spacing pushes them off the bottom of the screen. Annoying, as this was what I used to see which accounts had updates.
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  That seems too be the general trend with UI design these days. Less and less content, more space and the little content that's there gets made less prominent with low contrast. I find it quite upsetting.
iamleppert 11y ago
Is Twitter the new Yahoo!?
tolmasky 11y ago
The nice thing about Twitter apps is you can actually say "I'm pretty sure if just one person who cared got put on it, it could be WAY better than what we have today", because unlike other apps that we all "couch architect", we actually have the proof of this being the case. We have numerous case studies of 1 person or very small teams making really great Twitter apps (apps that actually influenced iOS design!). Twitter has a ton of employees. Unless you actively believe the Mac app will hurt your business there should just be one full time engineer on it, someone who loves ObjC and UI design, who can use Twitter as a testbed for crazy UX ideas. If its not important, than whats the worst that can happen, you generate a ton of developer respect?
- dewitt 11y ago
  > … there should just be one full time engineer on it … Agree with everything you just said, except, please make it two engineers. Speaking as a prototypical eng manager who typically inherits these types of projects when "that one engineer" leaves the company, I strongly believe that any job worth doing is worth doing by more than one person. (Plus, a good peer, just to bounce ideas off of and do informed code reviews with, is worth their weight in stars.) PS: I thought @jack was going to open the third-party ecosystem back up again. That also has the potential to help address this problem. Did that not happen? [1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9586084/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-apology-developers http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9586084/jack-dorsey-twitt...
  - hrayr 11y ago
    > PS: I thought @jack was going to open the third-party ecosystem back up again. That also has the potential to help address this problem. Did that not happen? I asked Jack about the third-party ecosystem on his producthunt Q&A, he said Fabric is a strong offering and they're building more to repair relationship.[1] I don't know if them building developer tools is same as repairing relationships though. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/live/jack-dorsey#comment-202231 https://www.producthunt.com/live/jack-dorsey#comment-202231
    - deleted 11y ago
sdegutis 11y ago
The original Twitter Mac app wasn't made by Twitter either. It was made by Loren Brichter and sold as Tweetie, until Twitter bought it and just renamed it to Twitter for Mac with I think literally 0 changes.
draw_down 11y ago
It's sad that their apps aren't as good as they were years ago. Software is supposed to, you know, get better. Then again, Loren Brichter does set a really high bar.
drewcrawford 11y ago
You'd be amazed at how many companies don't write their own apps. I know, because often the people who write them is me. The problem is that there's a fixed, small quantity of good, senior, Mac/iOS developers. A lot of them like being independent and flitting around from project to project because that is how you build an experienced developer to begin with. Meanwhile there is all this demand for apps, and so agencies act as the "market-markers"–acting as the sales force, the marketing team, and playing the role of "nobody got fired for hiring $AGENCY" etc.–but the actual lead engineers are pretty much the same bunch of schmucks no matter whose name is on the contract. If you want to know who wrote it, check the names in the header files, and we all meet at the same bars on Thursday nights. I always advise people to cut out the middle man and hire the indies directly (disclosure: that would be me) since it's the same thing anyway, except cheaper and with fewer games of "telephone". But the pull of the pretty logo and the rapport with the Account Manager is strong. Black Pixel is better than most of the agencies in that they do a large amount of their work in-house. But their "in-house" people are often just good contractors taking a break from contracting so I'm not entirely sure what you've accomplished by doing that. I'm not really complaining–agencies have historically been a reliable source of gigs for me, and so they are my friends; they provide me a valuable service. But do they provide you a valuable service? That I don't know. I have been in situations before where no matter which vendor the customer went with, I would be an engineer on the project, and the customer sat down and agonized over who to choose. That just seems inefficient.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  It's called "consultant." Companies like to hire consultants because they can get rid of these contractors through middlemen in a matter of a day to a few weeks. Of course, depending on which consulting agency. For projects you don't know the outcome yet it's better to write off your book that way, but for project that will last forever like Twitter App, yeah, just hire the damn team into full time already. Differently cheaper. Actually I don't understand why they can't just have the iOS team help with it anyway. If you are capable of writing a Mac App, how hard is it to learn making iOS one, and vice versa?
  - 11y ago
clumsysmurf 11y ago
I crashed it within a few minutes. Clicked Lists -> Member Tab => Subscribed Tab ... beachball, crash. I'm surprised in a way this is a native OS X App - from what I've seen of Node.js + electron something identical could have been written that was cross platform.
nitin_flanker 11y ago
And thing that we can learn from this is that if everything goes right, companies because of matter of pride, don't disclose the outsourcing. But if anything goes wrong, they will make it a point that they are not the people who have developed the APP but this is that particular agency that did. business
incepted 11y ago
Can't really blame Twitter for estimating that the minuscule Mac OS market is not worth wasting their engineers on. Better outsource and get your own engineers to work on core business stuff.
natch 11y ago
>said the developer is Black Pixel, a well-regarded digital studio Not well regarded if you paid them money for their Kaleidoscope app, which is pretty poor quality.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  Any suggestions for a better graphical diff tool for OS X?
  - natch 11y ago
    There must be something better. Hard to be worse. But I don't know of anything. If you can go non-graphical, there's rsync. Then for diffing inside files, if you have Xcode, there's FileMerge which is hiding in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/FileMerge.app It's not an integrated solution, though, as Kaleidoscope aspires to be.
forgingahead 11y ago
Must be a slow news day
sidchilling 11y ago
Probably that's why the new app sucks... just like it's predecessor.
flurdy 11y ago
What is the purpose of not sunsetting this app on the desktop? Twitter already owns Tweetdeck which seems like a major overlap. https://about.twitter.com/products/tweetdeck https://about.twitter.com/products/tweetdeck After all Twitter only list their IOS/Android apps and Tweetdeck in the footer on their about pages.
rloc 11y ago
I really thought this app was made using some tool similar to Electron. I'm pretty sure you could achieve a similar result easily with web tech. Not only with such tech Twitter could have leveraged their internal web expertise instead of outsourcing for this app but they would have gained the Windows Store version for 0 additional cost. I checked and the Twitter windows version differs and probably required another external company (or maybe Microsoft help). I'm a web developer myself and was really impressed with Electron that I discovered very recently. I'll surely use it for the mac app store version. On windows there's already a way to package a web app in Visual Studio (pretty similar to Electron but uses Edge instead of Chromium).
- SyneRyder 11y ago
  There's more to it than that. You could build it with web tech, but the original Twitter apps (even from when it was called Tweetie) featured lots of performance optimizations [1] to make it blistering fast, designed specifically for Apple platforms. They (ie Loren Brichter) even developed their own Mac UI framework library twUI, which was open sourced in 2011. [2] [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100922230053/http://blog.atebits.com/2008/12/fast-scrolling-in-tweetie-with-uitableview/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100922230053/http://blog.atebit... [2] https://blog.twitter.com/2011/fast-core-animation-ui-for-the-mac https://blog.twitter.com/2011/fast-core-animation-ui-for-the...
  - rloc 11y ago
    But do we know if it's still in use in the new app (probably...) ? The libraries were introduced a long time ago and were probably first developed for the iPhone. For this new app they outsourced the effort despite the fact that they acquired Tweetie and hired Brichter. I understand the history of it but my point is I'm not sure this is all still relevant in 2015 especially if Twitter outsourced the effort for this new version. A chromium instance can have fast animations on a mac or windows machine with only web tech (a lot easier to maintain).

155 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

Why? This doesn't make logical sense. It's a large company with enough resources. I get that the Mac is a lower priority, but why put your name on anything this bad. It's pretty clear how you should approach this: a) We're going to do this and we'll do it right. It might be a smaller audience, but if we release this product under our name it will be awesome. b) This isn't a priority, so we're not going to ship something half baked and outsource it. Here's a link to TweetDeck and TweetBot.

forrestthewoods 11y ago
> but why put your name on anything this bad It's possible that someone signed a bad contract. I've seen terrible products worked on or released because certain rights were sold in ways they shouldn't have been sold. That's not an excuse as it should still never happen. But it can go down that way.
- jasonlbaptiste 11y ago
  Totally, but even if it was say a 500k contract, you chalk it up as a loss and don't release it.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Sounds like a case where the incentives for the company don't line up with the incentives for an individual manager. The responsible person might have suffered greatly (or at least thought they would) if they had just declared that much money to be a lesson learned on a bad idea, even if that might have been best for Twitter.
morgante 11y ago
> b) This isn't a priority, so we're not going to ship something half baked and outsource it. Here's a link to TweetDeck and TweetBot. Since the API now effectively forbids third party apps, that doesn't seem like a viable option.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  TweetDeck hasn't been third party since Twitter acquired it in 2011.
  - morgante 11y ago
    Oh, in that case I completely agree. They should have just rebranded TweetDeck as the new official Twitter OS X client.
    - ChrisClark 11y ago
      The old Twitter app for OS X wasn't theirs either, they just bought and re-branded Tweetie. So they could have re-branded TweetDeck even more easily.

perseusprime122 11y ago

Lack of skill set. Twitter mostly has good backend engineers and never really focused on building a strong front end engineering and UX organizations.

agiamas 11y ago
I don't agree. As an example: Bootstrap, by Twitter - http://bootstrapdocs.com/v2.0.2/docs/ http://bootstrapdocs.com/v2.0.2/docs/

perseusprime122 11y ago

Lack of skills, and speed to market are two reasons I can think of

rocky1138 11y ago

Why don't people just go to https://twitter.com https://twitter.com in their web browser instead?

dilap 11y ago
as a tweetbot* user, i can tell you that for me the native experience is way better than a web page. edit: tweetBOT, not DECK, and we regret the error! *tho it has which has its own frustrations, and totally apathetic devs :'(
jfb 11y ago
Some people hate web apps.
cballard 11y ago
Ads and general horribleness that is the Twitter UI, although that's an argument for using Tweetbot, not the bad official Twitter apps.
mikeash 11y ago
The browser has a lot of window chrome I don't need. The browser window doesn't easily resize to a natural size for Twitter use. The browser either won't remember the size, or it will remember too well and start trying to apply that size to new windows that aren't meant for Twitter. The browser won't put an icon in my menu bar to show when new stuff has arrived. The twitter.com window will be mixed in with the others, so cycling through them with cmd-` will be annoying. Conversely, getting to that window specifically will require more work to find it among the others. Basically, this is a microcosm of why people use native apps at all. The answer is pretty much always "they work a lot better."
- oblio 11y ago
  The real question: why don't browsers support all of that through a new web standard? None of that is rocket science.
  - 11y ago

danielrakh 11y ago

I think this project was put into works > 1 year ago. It's obvious it wasn't designed to incorporate Moments, the no character limit for DM's and Polls (all new features from 2015). Building out a Mac app shouldn't be a top priority of any company today, unless you're into productivity (i.e. Sketch, Adobe). I'm almost sure that Twitter was stretched thin with Obj-c/Swift engineers building out the iPad app and refreshing the iPhone app (Moments) this past year.

santaclaus 11y ago

I've seen one person Mac shops put out apps of way more complexity than a Twitter client -- could Twitter seriously not hire a single native Mac dev?

krschultz 11y ago
I'm not familiar with Twitter, but I've been in this situation before elsewhere. An independent developer can bang out a good enough clone for the app that works in 85% of the use cases. Most users would never know the parts that are broken. An internal developer can't ship that app. The 15% of the cases where it doesn't match the desired business intent torpedo shipping it. Keep in mind the alternative option to the native app is using the web app which likely works in 99% of cases. It's unacceptable to whatever section of the company doesn't have their feature in the native app (but do in the web app) to 'lose' users. Of course that last 15% of the features leads to a doubling of complexity.
- smackfu 11y ago
  For instance, none of the third-party Twitter apps show ads. And that's exactly the part of the app that would have a lot of A/B testing and new features.
nathanvanfleet 11y ago
I thought they had a dozen devs on the iOs client. Amazingly.

rubyn00bie 11y ago

Two thoughts from this, first about this in general. Second is in regards to some comments I'm seeing posted here: 1.) I am surprised this doesn't happen more. You find a company that's excited to build it, let them run with it, then if it ever becomes a target you acquihire. 2.) Folks internally probably know a Mac app isn't a target. Thus, who would want to work on it? There are probably loads of more exciting projects that'll get recognition. It's not that they can't, it's that no one there (really) wants to...

alanh 11y ago
Not bad for guesswork, as you are correct management never wanted to prioritize it, but w.r.t. devs, you are off the mark. Internally there have always been those who wanted to work for it. I have been privately told (in late October 2015) by a former Twitter employee who is, shall we say, intimately familiar with Twitter/Mac: > Twitter has always seemed to hate the idea of a Mac app and has either tried to kill it or let it rot. At this point I think 3 generations of rogue devs inside the company have basically had to sneak around management to work on it. > Interesting to see them publicly announce an update. Rumor is they've completely outsourced development though.
- rubyn00bie 11y ago
  Thanks for the info! Interesting management was contemptuous of it. I wouldn't have expected that. Though with that said, I'd like to lay a bit more guesswork down now. Those devs were probably good, I'd guess too good (for these purposes), and that management wanted them focused on core products which serve their target better... Like iOS? So it is probably less about contempt for the Mac product and more about the best usage of resources. I have a feeling the rogues at Twitter who want to work on this are in a pretty high pay grade, even compared to the folks at the shop that made it. So it even still probably saved money. With all that, has Twitter made the best use of those developer resources? I have no clue.
  - guelo 11y ago
    I wonder what would happen if one of these large internet companies with top engineering talent would fire all their product managers and designers. That's how Google worked back when they had their period of highest innovation.

cbeach 11y ago

Far too much wasted space in the new UI - between icons, tweets etc. I used to be able to see all my accounts on the left-hand navigation bar, and now I can't because the increased spacing pushes them off the bottom of the screen. Annoying, as this was what I used to see which accounts had updates.

ajmurmann 11y ago
That seems too be the general trend with UI design these days. Less and less content, more space and the little content that's there gets made less prominent with low contrast. I find it quite upsetting.

iamleppert 11y ago

Is Twitter the new Yahoo!?

tolmasky 11y ago

The nice thing about Twitter apps is you can actually say "I'm pretty sure if just one person who cared got put on it, it could be WAY better than what we have today", because unlike other apps that we all "couch architect", we actually have the proof of this being the case. We have numerous case studies of 1 person or very small teams making really great Twitter apps (apps that actually influenced iOS design!). Twitter has a ton of employees. Unless you actively believe the Mac app will hurt your business there should just be one full time engineer on it, someone who loves ObjC and UI design, who can use Twitter as a testbed for crazy UX ideas. If its not important, than whats the worst that can happen, you generate a ton of developer respect?

dewitt 11y ago
> … there should just be one full time engineer on it … Agree with everything you just said, except, please make it two engineers. Speaking as a prototypical eng manager who typically inherits these types of projects when "that one engineer" leaves the company, I strongly believe that any job worth doing is worth doing by more than one person. (Plus, a good peer, just to bounce ideas off of and do informed code reviews with, is worth their weight in stars.) PS: I thought @jack was going to open the third-party ecosystem back up again. That also has the potential to help address this problem. Did that not happen? [1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9586084/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-apology-developers http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9586084/jack-dorsey-twitt...
- hrayr 11y ago
  > PS: I thought @jack was going to open the third-party ecosystem back up again. That also has the potential to help address this problem. Did that not happen? I asked Jack about the third-party ecosystem on his producthunt Q&A, he said Fabric is a strong offering and they're building more to repair relationship.[1] I don't know if them building developer tools is same as repairing relationships though. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/live/jack-dorsey#comment-202231 https://www.producthunt.com/live/jack-dorsey#comment-202231
  - deleted 11y ago

sdegutis 11y ago

The original Twitter Mac app wasn't made by Twitter either. It was made by Loren Brichter and sold as Tweetie, until Twitter bought it and just renamed it to Twitter for Mac with I think literally 0 changes.

draw_down 11y ago

It's sad that their apps aren't as good as they were years ago. Software is supposed to, you know, get better. Then again, Loren Brichter does set a really high bar.

drewcrawford 11y ago

You'd be amazed at how many companies don't write their own apps. I know, because often the people who write them is me. The problem is that there's a fixed, small quantity of good, senior, Mac/iOS developers. A lot of them like being independent and flitting around from project to project because that is how you build an experienced developer to begin with. Meanwhile there is all this demand for apps, and so agencies act as the "market-markers"–acting as the sales force, the marketing team, and playing the role of "nobody got fired for hiring $AGENCY" etc.–but the actual lead engineers are pretty much the same bunch of schmucks no matter whose name is on the contract. If you want to know who wrote it, check the names in the header files, and we all meet at the same bars on Thursday nights. I always advise people to cut out the middle man and hire the indies directly (disclosure: that would be me) since it's the same thing anyway, except cheaper and with fewer games of "telephone". But the pull of the pretty logo and the rapport with the Account Manager is strong. Black Pixel is better than most of the agencies in that they do a large amount of their work in-house. But their "in-house" people are often just good contractors taking a break from contracting so I'm not entirely sure what you've accomplished by doing that. I'm not really complaining–agencies have historically been a reliable source of gigs for me, and so they are my friends; they provide me a valuable service. But do they provide you a valuable service? That I don't know. I have been in situations before where no matter which vendor the customer went with, I would be an engineer on the project, and the customer sat down and agonized over who to choose. That just seems inefficient.

yeukhon 11y ago
It's called "consultant." Companies like to hire consultants because they can get rid of these contractors through middlemen in a matter of a day to a few weeks. Of course, depending on which consulting agency. For projects you don't know the outcome yet it's better to write off your book that way, but for project that will last forever like Twitter App, yeah, just hire the damn team into full time already. Differently cheaper. Actually I don't understand why they can't just have the iOS team help with it anyway. If you are capable of writing a Mac App, how hard is it to learn making iOS one, and vice versa?
- 11y ago

clumsysmurf 11y ago

I crashed it within a few minutes. Clicked Lists -> Member Tab => Subscribed Tab ... beachball, crash. I'm surprised in a way this is a native OS X App - from what I've seen of Node.js + electron something identical could have been written that was cross platform.

nitin_flanker 11y ago

And thing that we can learn from this is that if everything goes right, companies because of matter of pride, don't disclose the outsourcing. But if anything goes wrong, they will make it a point that they are not the people who have developed the APP but this is that particular agency that did. business

incepted 11y ago

Can't really blame Twitter for estimating that the minuscule Mac OS market is not worth wasting their engineers on. Better outsource and get your own engineers to work on core business stuff.

natch 11y ago

>said the developer is Black Pixel, a well-regarded digital studio Not well regarded if you paid them money for their Kaleidoscope app, which is pretty poor quality.

FireBeyond 11y ago
Any suggestions for a better graphical diff tool for OS X?
- natch 11y ago
  There must be something better. Hard to be worse. But I don't know of anything. If you can go non-graphical, there's rsync. Then for diffing inside files, if you have Xcode, there's FileMerge which is hiding in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/FileMerge.app It's not an integrated solution, though, as Kaleidoscope aspires to be.

forgingahead 11y ago

Must be a slow news day

sidchilling 11y ago

Probably that's why the new app sucks... just like it's predecessor.

flurdy 11y ago

What is the purpose of not sunsetting this app on the desktop? Twitter already owns Tweetdeck which seems like a major overlap. https://about.twitter.com/products/tweetdeck https://about.twitter.com/products/tweetdeck After all Twitter only list their IOS/Android apps and Tweetdeck in the footer on their about pages.

rloc 11y ago

I really thought this app was made using some tool similar to Electron. I'm pretty sure you could achieve a similar result easily with web tech. Not only with such tech Twitter could have leveraged their internal web expertise instead of outsourcing for this app but they would have gained the Windows Store version for 0 additional cost. I checked and the Twitter windows version differs and probably required another external company (or maybe Microsoft help). I'm a web developer myself and was really impressed with Electron that I discovered very recently. I'll surely use it for the mac app store version. On windows there's already a way to package a web app in Visual Studio (pretty similar to Electron but uses Edge instead of Chromium).

SyneRyder 11y ago
There's more to it than that. You could build it with web tech, but the original Twitter apps (even from when it was called Tweetie) featured lots of performance optimizations [1] to make it blistering fast, designed specifically for Apple platforms. They (ie Loren Brichter) even developed their own Mac UI framework library twUI, which was open sourced in 2011. [2] [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100922230053/http://blog.atebits.com/2008/12/fast-scrolling-in-tweetie-with-uitableview/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100922230053/http://blog.atebit... [2] https://blog.twitter.com/2011/fast-core-animation-ui-for-the-mac https://blog.twitter.com/2011/fast-core-animation-ui-for-the...
- rloc 11y ago
  But do we know if it's still in use in the new app (probably...) ? The libraries were introduced a long time ago and were probably first developed for the iPhone. For this new app they outsourced the effort despite the fact that they acquired Tweetie and hired Brichter. I understand the history of it but my point is I'm not sure this is all still relevant in 2015 especially if Twitter outsourced the effort for this new version. A chromium instance can have fast animations on a mac or windows machine with only web tech (a lot easier to maintain).