It’s no secret that Twitter for iPhone (née Tweetie) is often regarded as the gold standard for mobile apps — it blends functionality, performance, and usability together with a dash of playful quirkiness that works so well Twitter just
bought the app and hired developer Loren Brichter back in April. That delayed the release of an iPad version, but Twitter’s finally come through — and as you’d expect, Twitter for iPad does things just as uniquely as its sister apps on the iPhone and Mac. In fact, we’d go so far as to say a few of its interface conventions will become as commonplace as slide-to-refresh, which was first introduced in Tweetie for iPhone — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
These basic interface elements are the same regardless of portrait or landscape orientation, although there’s a massive empty space to the right of timeline in landscape view when you first open the app. But wait: selecting a tweet brings up a slideable sheet that fills the space with a number of context-sensitive panels — user profiles, a browser pane that loads the links in a tweet, a pinch-and-zoom photo viewer. All of the panels can be slid back and forth so you can see what’s underneath and switch between them — it’s almost like overlapping windows.
Twitter’s sliding panels UI is definitely one of the most unique and usable iPad interface concepts we’ve ever seen, and we’re pretty sure it’ll be aped by all sort of other apps in the near future — and just like pull-to-refresh, there are going to be good implementations and complete catastrophes. Indeed, even Twitter’s implementation can get a little cluttered and chaotic. But it’s nice to see Twitter and Loren Brichter have carried on Tweetie’s legacy of UI innovation with Twitter for iPad — and that they’re doing it in a great free app makes it even better. We’re told it should start appearing in the App Store now, so go grab it.
