One Thin Tumbl

Well, it finally arrived early this morning: the future of magazines. The first issue of Wired for the iPad lives up to the promise of all those demo videos we drooled over. It’s beautifully designed, and doubly so: the app’s UI is elegant and intuitive, so navigating the magazine immediately makes sense. Better, the articles themselves are laid out to be sharp, engaging, and readable. (Oh, right, that’s what magazines have always offered over the mere text-dumps of most magazine and newspaper web sites.) Text is set to be crisp and legible (already more so, somehow, than iBooks), and, probably crucial to the experience, pages don’t scroll — they slide out and in as discrete units. (Considering as well how much more pleasant Instapaper on the iPad is when set to page-at-a-time reading, instead of scrolling, suggests that the ubiquitous scrolling text of the web and desktop world was never very friendly to reading.)

Bits of interactivity — whether it’s touching images in a small feature to change associated text, or swiping a finger left and right, Quicktime VR style, to animate an illustration — are, thank goodness, largely in service to the article, and not just tech candy. There aren’t as many touchable doodads as there may have been, which tells me the editors used good discretion on when to supplement what, in the end, is the real content: the articles themselves.

If you’re a design dork like me you’ll also be flipping between portrait and landscape on nearly every page (uh, yes, even the ads) to see the thoughtful layouts created for each orientation. I haven’t found either to be superior as far as reading, which means a bunch of people did their job well.

Granted, in its first iPad incarnation, Wired already frustrates a little: the download itself is huge, evidently weighed down by baked-in videos — most of which are part of ads (which, happily, don’t play automatically). Surely this heft could be thinned down to something streaming, especially for non-editorial content. Meantime, will the app offer a way to manage which issues I’m storing on my suddenly smaller-seeming 16 GB device? And how much will each issue cost?

Small nicks on the big picture. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this app is that, for all the design and tech whiz-bang involved, within a few minutes I wasn’t so concerned with flipping pages or checking the UI. I was actually reading articles — comfortably, happily, and wanting to read more.

That, my dears, is technology and design truly supporting content.

Right now iPhone geeks with Twitter tendencies are buzzing about Tweetie 2, which its developer, Loren Brichter, has just submitted to the App Store. The previews of Tweetie 2 I’ve read so far go on about how smooth and fast Tweetie is already (true enough), how popular the first version has been (yep), and how it’s the one Twitter client that really nails that native iPhone UI feel.

Oh. But. Except. Over in the corner there, all handsome and unassuming, is Buzz Andersen’s Birdfeed. And I’m gonna let Tweetie 2 finish and all, but I just want to say…

Birdfeed very faithfully keeps a native iPhone feel, and is as quick and smooth as Tweetie. Actually, it’s arguably quicker and smoother. Not only that, but as nice as Tweetie’s interface is (and I’m including what I’ve read of Tweetie 2 here as well), it’s cluttered compared to Birdfeed’s elegant design. Consider just the experience of reading through your timeline. Which of these views is more attractive and legible? Which puts your eyes on what’s important?

Here’s Tweetie 2:

And here’s Birdfeed:

On Tweetie, the text runs together, without clear separation between tweets. That thin gray line isn’t enough to do the work of thoughtful white space. Also, you’ll see that Birdfeed doesn’t include a tab bar at the bottom. Odd, right? But look at all that extra space it frees up for reading tweets. But do we lose navigation to mentions, DMs, and such? Nope. I’ll get to that in a sec.

For me, the better visual design alone will keep me using Birdfeed. But there’s more to it than that. It’s a tough thing to describe or grab screenshots of, but Birdfeed just feels good to use.

Now I don’t deny that the Tweetie 2 feature list is impressive. From all I hear, Loren Brichter is one talented code-slinger. But much of the joy of using Birdfeed is its use of a design principle called progressive disclosure, an elusive but powerful property whereby an application presents only what is needed as it’s needed, gracefully exposing more features and complexity only when the user seeks them out. In other words, the power is there, but it sticks to doing its job, not getting in your way.

For instance, in Birdfeed, you’re not visually “bothered” by mentions or DMs until you’d want to be — i.e., when you have new ones. At that point an unread count appears next to your account name at the top left, which sensibly enough, is also the button that takes you to the menu for other views — including mentions and DMs. (This design also echoes the iPhone mail app, where the upper left button takes you back out to other folders and, one level further, other accounts. Birdfeed leverages an interface already learned.)

The design of Birdfeed is based on what a real user is likely to be doing: focusing on reading tweets in the main timeline view, not needing to worry about replying, retweeting, adding a favorite, etc., until a particular tweet catches his attention, at which point tapping it reveals a different view with a new design tailored to exactly that change in attention. Only at that point are newly relevant functions displayed.

Most any decently designed application makes rudimentary use of progressive disclosure. But using it very well is a tricky business; it takes foresight, it takes restraint. Very few apps really pull it off. It’s just too tempting to glam up an interface with visible features, because they look sexy in screenshots. They make the app look powerful. But nobody checks their email with a screenshot.

Smart progressive disclosure creates other tough-to-quantify benefits. For instance, optimizing loading times is an important way to increase an app’s speed. Less recognized, though, is the time saved in not having to figure out how to do something, in not spending your attention where it isn’t currently needed. If you act faster in an app, the app is faster.

It’s not that Tweetie doesn’t express good design principles. It does. It’s just that Birdfeed goes even further. The original Tweetie is a very nice app, and Tweetie 2 adds much of what I wanted to see (like local caching). But it’s really tough to quantify excellent design in bullet points, or even in words. Rather, you know it when you have the pleasure of using it. Which is also why, as a UI geek, I’ll be downloading Tweetie 2 to swipe and tap its newness, but for the day-to-day rough-and-tumble, I’ll almost certainly keep Birdfeed as my Twitter Number One, nested down there on the honorable home row. It just feels so right.