\n — @adurdin is thinking aloud

Tweetbot Gestures

John Gruber on Tweetbot:

Two favorite aspects. First, when you tap a tweet in your timeline, it gets selected and a bar of buttons to act on the tweet appears beneath it. Most Twitter clients, when you tap a tweet, present that tweet in a standalone view, sliding over to the right. With Tweetbot’s inline action bar, you can do something like replying or marking as a favorite and then immediately go back to scrolling the list of tweets — no need to tap a “Back” button.

Second — and this is the feature that’s proven the most addictive for me — is that you can slide left-to-right on any tweet to get a conversation thread of tweets. I.e., if a tweet is a reply to some other tweet, sliding left-to-right on it shows you a thread of all tweets in that reply chain. All popular Twitter clients have this sort of “conversation view” feature, but only Tweetbot lets you access it with a single gesture in your timeline.

Two of the conventions that Apple’s iPhone apps established for table views are tap-for-detail and swipe-to-delete (or rather, to reveal a delete button). In the official Twitter for iPhone app, Loren Brichter followed the first of these, but expanded on the latter so that a swipe would reveal buttons to reply, retweet, and so on1.

This swipe-for-actions gesture was to me a very natural expansion of the original semantics, and one which I’m disappointed has not seen further uptake. Instead, I’ve seen a number of strange meanings imparted to the swipe. Reeder comes to mind, as it coöpts swipe to mean ‘mark as read’ or ‘mark as unread’2.

So my initial reaction to these gestures in Tweetbot—before I’ve tried it, mind you—is that they’re strange: the opposite of the guidelines Apple has established and recommended. But they are after all only guidelines.

1. Interestingly, this does not include a delete button even on your own tweets.

2. Reeder also fails to provide very visible feedback on either of these actions—a slight change in text contrast and a very small icon change is all you see.