Even with the design team exercising heroic self-restraint, the feature list for Twitterrific 2 still added a slew of options for manipulating individual tweets. At the same time, they wanted to make it faster to get at those tools. Twitterrific's first version required you to tap to a separate detail screen to work with a tweet. One goal for Twitterrific 2 was to let you do more directly from the main list of tweets. The challenge was where to stash all the controls for those actions. The standard approach would be to add the action icon to the toolbar and display an action sheet listing the options.
Craig: We found the action sheet to be really frustrating for this, because the list would change for different tweets. You can't delete somebody else's tweet, for example, so the delete button goes away for those tweets. Having buttons appear and disappear from the list gave you no positional stability. Buttons appeared in different locations on the screen, so you had to hunt through this long list of options every time. Designer Louie Mantia came up with the idea of doing a kind of custom keyboard, a collection of buttons for actions. The difference is that you can actually disable those buttons, so the Delete button stays where it is but is just disabled, which was a good solution to that problem.
Gedeon: There was a lot of debate and back and forth about the order of the buttons, how many buttons to have, and what position they would be in. Is it two rows of four? Is it a row of three, a row of five? Which ones are on top, which ones are on bottom? We went around on that through so many revisions, changing the actions available and their layout, until we finally arrived at what we have now.
Craig: A subtle thing about the placement of the buttons is that they're oriented towards one-handed use. The Delete button is off to the right, the hardest location to tap for right-handed users, and we put other options where your thumb has to work less in order to get to more commonly used actions. We think a lot about where things get placed based upon ergonomics.
