High Order Blog

When we released Twitbit 1.1 we felt like the majority of work was behind us. Sure, we still had some sizable features to implement, but the framework was done.  The major pieces were in place. The style was solidified. We spent a couple days away from the code base after the release and returned to discover our sentimental attachment to it faded. We sat down to code with fresh perspectives and what started as a 1.2 became a 2.0.

We fall into a useful state of denial during a release phase. We rationalize away problems with our design and conclude the code couldn’t possibly be any better. That’s useful for the purpose of getting something out the door. But once it’s out, and once we’ve had some time to recover from a frantic development cycle, our self-evaluation becomes a little more sober.

In the case of Twitbit 1.1, we really had a problem with the ‘More’ tab. That is, we had 7 functional tabs, but the last three were tucked under an organizational tab called ‘More’.  It just didn’t feel right. We deliberated long and hard about whether to even use tabs — and we’re comfortable with that decision — but are the functions of Twitter so diverse as to justify more than 5 tabs? After all, much of the appeal of Twitter is its simplicity. It wasn’t so much a matter of concrete problems with 5+ tabs, but that it indicated a degree of laziness on our part. It felt bloated; like the UI was too big for the feature set. There was a mentality of “new function, new tab”. Simple solutions are usually best, and our solutions were definitely that. But in this case that reasoning felt like an excuse.

We swallowed our pride and set out to get our app back to 5 tabs. We were open to every possibility, no matter how much work it entailed. You’ll have to wait for Twitbit 2.0 to see exactly how we did it, but we did do it.  5 tabs. I’ll give you a hint: some of the common tricks in our toolbox were persistence, shortcuts and generally considering how other apps solved similar problems elegantly.

The interesting part has nothing to do with 5 being a magic number, but what we observed during this exercise of reduction. The natural assumption is that you’d have to make sacrifices in the UI to support more functionality. Turns out, the opposite can also happen. We learned that there’s an optimal UI density — and it’s possible to be both too dense, but also too sparse. I’m reminded of that saying, “Sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”.

The result is a UI that feels a lot more powerful and intuitive. Patterns emerge and the app feels more familiar. Where we expected the user to choose tabs before based on arbitrary distinctions, there are now fewer choices. The UI feels more like a helpful guide than it had previously. The tradeoff, in some cases, is the number of taps to get you to your destination. In such cases, elegant shortcuts can help and even make the app feel more familiar and reduce taps.

I’m really pleased we overcame our state of denial. And I think Twitbit users will be, too.

Twitbit 1.1.1 is now available on the App Store! It’s primarily a bug fix release. More details about what’s new can be found in the release notes.

Meanwhile, we’re hard at work on getting Twitbit 2.0 out the door. We’re getting close to the end of our feature list, and we’ll be sharing more details soon.

Twitbit 1.1 is now available on the App Store! In addition to fixing the dreaded HTTP 401 posting error, it’s packed with new features.

Get it now!

We’re excited to announce the release of our latest product, Twitbit, a Twitter app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out on the App Store. We’ve worked hard to build a clean and elegant application that keeps the simple things simple while providing a rich and complete feature set.

We realize the Twitter iPhone application market is pretty crowded. The last few months alone have seen the release of several major new apps. With so much great work already being done, what do we have to contribute? And why would we want to?

Twitter’s genius is in its simplicity: people post short messages. Period. (Basically.)

The iPhone is the world’s first true handheld computer, and one of the most exciting developer playgrounds to come around in a long time.

In short, the possibilities are just too exciting to resist.

I can hear people saying, “this is all fine and dandy, but that doesn’t mean you just run out and build your own Twitter app.” It’s true that there’s already a lot of choice out there. We have several iPhone Twitter apps installed ourselves, and before we built Twitbit we used them regularly. They’re great pieces of software – we wouldn’t be using them if they weren’t – and we have a ton of respect for the work that’s gone into them.

Nevertheless, we feel that each one has its own set of shortcomings. We’d rather have a single Twitter app that fits with the way we think about and use Twitter.

Even more important, though, is that there are several significant features we want but that don’t exist in any Twitter iPhone app. The most significant is push notifications, which we’ve built into Twitbit (more on that in a minute), but it’s far from the last.

So we did what programmers do: we built our own.

We approached Twitbit the same way we’ve approached everything else we’ve built. We made something we love to use with the belief that others will love to use it, too.

Push Notifications for Twitter

Support for push notifications is one of the most significant features we wanted in a Twitter client. Still, supporting them gave us pause. While it has some advantages, push notifications are far from an ideal solution to the problem of “background tasks.” We’ve written before about both the technical and business challenges push notifications present in general, and for a small software company like ours in particular.

For all their problems, though, we felt like push notifications had huge potential for a Twitter app. For many users, they could completely transform their interaction with the service. The possibilities were just too exciting to pass up, so we took the plunge.

We’ve been using Twitbit amongst ourselves and our friends and family for a while now, and we can confirm that push notifications have changed the way we use Twitter. We think they will for other people, too.

Is My Entire Twitter Stream Pushed to Me?

No. Only mentions and direct messages are pushed. We are considering adding more fine-grained control over what gets pushed and what doesn’t, but for now you get all mentions and direct messages pushed to your phone. If you don’t want push notifications at all, simply turn them off in iPhone’s settings.

Are Push Notifications Sent in Real-Time?

No. Our service polls Twitter periodically. This is both the most robust and the easiest implementation Twitter provides at the moment. Twitter does have a real-time API, but it’s only alpha quality right now so we didn’t think it made sense to use it for the first version. We are very interested in experimenting with it in the not-too-distant future, however.

That said, one of our primary concerns is getting push notifications as close to real-time as possible. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on our servers and working hard to reduce the polling interval as much as we can.

What Are Twitbit’s Other Features?

Twtbit provides a ton of great features, including OAuth authentication, so you don’t have to give your Twitter username and password to yet another application; cached timelines; and overall speed and ease-of-use. You can find a full feature list on the Twitbit web page.

We’re Just Getting Started

Twitbit 1.0 is a complete and full-featured Twitter application, but it’s only the beginning. We have a lot of very exciting and ambitious features planned for the future.

If you have any questions about Twitbit, suggestions for features, or if you think you’ve encountered a bug, please send us an email. We’d love to hear from you.

Aside from watching this blog, you can keep tabs on what’s keeping us busy by following @twitbitapp or @highorderbit on Twitter.

We’re excited to announce our biggest product yet: Twitbit, a Twitter client for iPhone and iPod Touch. We don’t want to give away too much just yet, but watch this blog and the Twitbit web page for the latest.

You can also follow on Twitter at @twitbitapp or @highorderbit.

If you want to be notified as soon as Twitbit’s available, give us your email address (no spam — we promise):

Code Watch, our GitHub client for iPhone, is now available for sale on the App Store! Code Watch lets you stay on top of your GitHub projects by giving you easy access to your public and private repositories, news feed, followed users, and favorite public repos right from your phone. Learn more about the features Code Watch supports on our product page.

We’ve also built a free version of Code Watch designed for open source developers called Code Watch Open Source. It has all the same functionality as Code Watch for your public repositories and news feed. It’s perfect for developers with open source projects hosted on GitHub.

Check ‘em out and let us know what you think. Feature requests, bug reports, and other general feedback is always welcome.

While we’ve dropped a few hints on our website and elsewhere, today we’re making it official: High Order Bit is building a Lighthouse client for the iPhone.  We still have some work to do, and the polished product might look significantly different from the screenshot below, but it will be available sometime this summer.  Until then, check out our other iPhone development products and let us know what other development utilities you’d like to see on the iPhone.

We’re excited to announce a free version of our soon-to-be-released GitHub iPhone client, Code Watch. It will include all the features of the paid version except for access to private repositories, making it quite suitable for open source developers choosing to host their GitHub projects publicly. For that reason, we’re calling it ‘Code Watch Open Source’. We know public code hosting isn’t technically synonymous with open source, but we preferred the name to ‘Code Watch Lite’.

We decided to release this app for a couple reasons. One, we value and want to embrace the open source community. While we think we can do much more, and intend to contribute open source code directly, we hope the community values this contribution. Two, Code Watch Open Source will serve as a trial version for potential customers and give us another marketing data point.

So if you have public repositories on GitHub, or want to evaluate the paid version of Code Watch, check out Code Watch Open Source on the iPhone App Store (available soon). We’re really proud of this app and we think you’ll love it.

Both versions of Code Watch have been submitted for release, so expect an announcement soon.

We’re hard at work on our next iPhone application: Code Watch. Like Build Watch, Code Watch is a tool for software developers. It’s a client for GitHub that lets developers track their activity, as well as keep up-to-date with their favorite GitHub projects and users.

We plan to keep our focus on developer-oriented iPhone applications for the time being. Part of our motivation is selfish: we want to build applications we’ll use ourselves. Since we’re spending the vast majority of our waking hours writing code, developer tools seem like a good starting point. We use both Build Watch and Code Watch every day, and we get a lot of value from them. We think other developers will, too.

Take a look at what we have in store for Code Watch. If there’s a feature you’d like to see implemented, let us know.

We’ve released our first application! It’s a continuous integration client for the iPhone. You can learn more about it (and purchase it) at the Build Watch product page. If you want to tell us how awesome it is, or suggest an improvement, please contact us at feedback@highorderbit.com.

We plan to invest a modest amount of money in advertising, and perhaps post the resulting sales on this blog. We’re also underway with our next app in the “Dev Watch” series, which we’ll be blogging about soon. So, if you haven’t yet done so, subscribe.