Broken metaphors

Tweetie used to be just a very popular iPhone client for Twitter. Now it has moved it to the desktop and it’s going to be one of the most popular desktop clients out there. Why? Because they focussed on solving the problem without getting caught-up developing a desktop application, and as it turns out, their “mobile” solution worked very well. So why change it?

For the last five years we’ve seen applications migrate from desktop to mobile. We’ve seen developers struggle to replicate the “desktop” experience, the desktop UI, the fluidity, and for the most part it has been painful stuff.

What’s interesting about Tweetie moving in the other direction, is the trend that it represents. Tweetie is the best application for Twitter, period. Good iPhone applications aren’t just on a par with their desktop equivalents, they’re better. This is the benefit of constraints.

There is no “desktop”

The old metaphor of a businessman’s desk complete with a leather chair, a rotary dial phone, files, folders, filing cabinets, clipboards, and dictaphones is dead. We work with computers now. We don’t need this metaphor anymore. It doesn’t make sense.

For every few Tweeties there’ll be the occasional TripLocator, but overall I believe that iPhone is showing designers a way forward. A way without “File->Save” or endless context menus. A way where everything you need is placed at your fingertips and there is no “read only” mode.

Consider the follow snippet from the iPhone UI guidelines…

Save data when possible in case the application exits? Now when wasn’t that a good idea?

It may take something like the iPhone to make us realise that we can finally throw out old conventions & metaphors and start looking for the new ones. Ones that make sense.