Dear Loren,

Let me state this straight up: I don’t want to sound like one of those creepy fanboys that daily knock at your door asking for a “BETA VERZION PLZZ”. These are just my thoughts, hoping that you won’t be disappointed by my position.

I understand that making a good app requires time. A lot of time. Guess how much time an high-quality app such as Tweetie would require. But the situation is getting a little bit awkward.I’m talking about Tweetie for Mac and the long-awaited 2.0 version which, in your words, was due to be released after Tweetie 2 for iPhone. You said Tweetie for Mac was upcoming back in September. It’s four months ago.

Now, please define “upcoming” Loren, because I don’t get it.

Really, I do understand that you don’t have a 30+ people working team and that you’re an independent developer, but you can’t treat the people who purchased Tweetie for Mac like this. They believed in your product, I still believe in it and I’m sure many other people do, but this is just wrong. Promising an upcoming huge update and then not giving a single hint about it. No news about the development, no replies to the users who daily ask you on Twitter about it - nothing.

I agree with the “don’t promise. just ship” policy, but the problem is you actually promised something months ago and never shipped anything. Not a single blog post about it. To me, it seems like you just don’t care about the situation and prefer to cover this buzz with silence. This is wrong.

And you know why? Because customers want to trust the person they’re paying. It’s not about “I give you money, you give me updates”, it’s about believing that the person you gave part of your money to will care about you and your trust in the future. I strongly believe that an application isn’t just some lines of code thrown up together, it’s so much more. A good application can change a life, I dare to say so. I would have never been able to achieve 10k Twitter followers if it wasn’t for Tweetie. It’s become part of my workflow, so seamlessly integrated that I just can’t imagine how can I work without it now.

But you’re making that fantasy a real thing, Loren. I’m finding myself looking for a new Twitter client for Mac everyday - I still haven’t found a good one. That’s because I still trust you, man. It’s just that I don’t understand this way of acting.

Glad to be proven wrong.

Your truly,

Federico Viticci

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“Now think about app quality. Not being able to test on an iPad will suck for sure. That’s why responsible developers won’t ship before they’re happy, and irresponsible ones will churn out crap with the same speed and vehemence as always. You can’t stop stupid. Apple will hopefully reject unusably crappy apps, but beyond that, expect the same mix of pearls and dogcrap in the store as today.

I wouldn’t be surprised if top-rate developers such as EA, Rockstar, Activision, ngmoco got early units to test on. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a huge number of apps got iPadded without too much fuss, real units in developers’ hands or not.”

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“You don’t have to try to please everybody and eventually create an application that is liked by nobody. In fact, since your users are in all likelihood in a situation where they can switch applications easily, and since they probably are not locked in by the need to open a specific file format in its native application, it might be a really bad idea for you to go down the «simply add up all the requested features» route of application design.

So eventually, the best course of action is to get rid of some features that just don’t work out anymore.”

Let me state this: I don’t need multitasking from the iPad. Even better, I don’t need multi-tasking from a 10 inches portable tablet device. But before I go through this, I believe we need some “background” about the whole multi-tasking problem.

First, go read this post from John Gruber where he explains the reasons nehind the lack of “backgrounding” on the iPhone.

“The profound simplicity of the iPhone user interface stems in part from the complete lack of interface elements for managing processes. There is no task manager or memory meter; if you want to know what’s running, the answer is simply whatever app it is that you’re looking at. “

Indeed, the iPhone is the finest example of “human interface”: you’re doing what you’re looking at. I could have Mail and Youtube running at the same time on my Mac, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m watching a video. Multi-tasking can be workflow, as Milind Alvares wrote in his SmokingApples piece, but it’s not an imperative. Just take a look at all those Mac applications that help you focusing on one app at a time: they basically bring single-tasking into your workflow once again.

I don’t need a multi-tasking capable portable device. I just need an excellent single-tasking oriented yet multi-purpose tablet. And that’s what Apple is building. How am I supposed to run 3 apps at a time on that screen? But physical limitations aside, let’s look at the concept itself.

The iPad isn’t meant for people who require multi-tasking.

My mother doesn’t need multi-tasking. She doesn’t even know what it’s multi-tasking. But surely she would appreciate an intuitive multitouch “tablet computer” which requires a few taps to have a very good browsing experience. I strongly believe that a great and focused user experience is better than a crappy and unusable “let-me-resize-that-window“-based workflow.

Does this mean I hate multi-tasking? No. It’s just that I want a new and different experience from the iPad. You know, focusing on one task at a time is really productive sometimes.

Great post over at Cocoia blog, where Sebastiaan has asked some questions to Mike Matas, former Delicious Library UI designer and worker at Apple. You’ve go to read this.

“My favorite designs are the ones that don’t just solve a problem, but also engage you on an emotional level—where you take away more from it than just the end result of its function.”

Nik Fletcher nails it in his latest blog post:

“Yes, it’s an entirely prescriptive way of computing - one that the hackers, tinkerers and geeks will find alien and protest about its lack of openness. But here’s the thing: for the people who the iPad is aimed at it really doesn’t matter that this experience is prescriptive - and the more you look at the decisions Apple seem to have made in building the software on the device, the more you realise that the iPad is perhaps the first high-technology product ready for - and entirely aimed at - a mainstream audience right from the get-go.”

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“The screen size is a huge difference. Try browsing the Web on the iPhone. Works well but you have to keep zooming in and out. You’ll need to zoom on the iPad, but not as much — you’ll see a lot more of the page which will make a big difference to the browsing experience. Same thing with photos, and videos, and pretty much everything else. While the iPhone is mainly a phone that does more, the iPad is a fully functional information consumption device. The fact that it uses the iPhone’s OS is also irrelevant because the OS in question is suited perfectly for what the product is intended to do. Instead of looking at the iPad as a big iPod Touch, you should look at it in isolation and ask: is this a good tablet device? The answer is: yes.”

Interesting post over at Smoking Apples, where Milind Alvares shares his thoughts about the iPad as a breakthrough device that will change the computing world as we know it forever.

From the post:

“I propose the next major shift in computing platforms has begun. It began with the iPhone, and it’s more evident with the iPad. Computers of the future won’t have a file system as we know it. There won’t be a Finder window, there won’t be a home folder, there definitely won’t be an applications folder. So far progress in the computing world has been all about adding new features. From now on its going to be about removing things to make room for a better experience.”

This is an interesting theory. Pretty much what Google is building with Chrome OS: making the file system structure invisible to the user, pushing everything to the web. But there are many drawbacks in doing this, and Milind just got it right:

“Take word processing for instance. iWork documents will reside on the web, but only immediately required documents will be cached locally—why would you want documents from 2 years ago available for editing? These documents will be available on the iPad for editing, iPhone for viewing and projecting, and any other device that fits into Apple’s product lineup. That’s where Google has it wrong. To roughly quote Jobs in 2005, “the marriage of cloud services, with rich local client apps, is a great thing”. Google wants to do everything in the cloud, including writing the software that drives it—as is seen in their Chrome OS. Apple wants to create rich local functionality that drives itself with data from the cloud.”

This is the main point. You can’t force the user to edit documents online, because you don’t know if the user will have a 24/7/365 active internet connection. Everyone should, sure, but the reality it’s a little but different from this utopia. Just as I wrote in my post about Chrome OS some time ago, a total-cloud OS is going to fail. Turns out that the solution lies in both “clouding” things and caching them locally. You want to open a recent document? Just fire up Pages on your iPad and choose it. You remember you had this 6 months old spreadsheet that could come in handy again? Head over iWork.com and download it again. That’s how cloud computing should work in my opinion, that’s what Apple will do.

What really bothers me is thinking that the file system structure will die at any level. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of those people that believe the iPad is introducing a new era of personal computing. But thinking that for this reason desktop computers will change forever into biggest iPads is just as dumb as thinking that mobile phones will replace my dial-up home phone. Sure I don’t use my home phone that much, but when everytime I need it - it’s there. I believe that in the next years I’ll use the iPad maybe even more than my Macbook, but it won’t replace. The Finder window won’t disappear, it will be different. But it will be there.

Mike Rundle nailed it.

“This is the iPad’s intended audience. People who have a PC and use 10% of its features and software 90% of the time. People like my Mom & Dad who browse the web, read news, send email and watch videos. People like my cousin Jenny who chats with friends, uses Facebook and uploads photos. Regular folks. Consumers. People who use computers to stay informed, connected and entertained.”