Magic

John Gruber really liked Tapbot’s new Twitter client, 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.

Lots of people hated the program for its user interface innovation, which is exactly what caught Gruber’s attention. Gruber tries to reconcile these sentiments in an essay titled Magic.

All this interface polishing is shiny, but does it matter? I worry that we spend all our time minimizing taps and perfecting shiny shadows, and not nearly enough time making software do things tomorrow that we cannot manage to do today.