Tweetie on the left, Twitter for Mac (neé Tweetie 2) on the right.

There’s an awful lot wrong with the newly released Twitter from a UI perspective. Sure, it’s interesting, but it’s not good. It trades window chrome for marginally more vertical space. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but Twitter’s pursuit of a clean, minimal interface goes too far.

Chrome has its place on an app like this. Where, for example, do I grab to move the window about? The answer is non-obvious (the black bits). Having a Tweetie-style title bar adds marginally more chrome but means that noöne has to think about how to move the app window. Presumably, this lack of chrome was made in anticipation of Lion’s fullscreen mode, wherein chrome literally becomes wasted space, but ripping it out totally is a mistake. Keeping it there when windowed, removing it when fullscreened — à la iPhoto ’11 — is the much better choice.

Worse: contrast has radically diminished across the app. The buttons in the sidebar are much harder to see; the notification badge becomes a lower-contrast smudge; text is now smaller, and grey-on-white; @mentions have become a pale yellow in a sea of white; and the Close/Maximise/Minimise buttons have become almost completely invisible even when hovered. Granted, everyone knows where they are, but actually mousing over them becomes vastly more difficult — near-black-on-black is about the single worst choice you could make for any UI element, nevermind one as important as this. (I also dislike the change from Lucida Grande to Helvetica; Helvetica works well at a largish size on a high DPI display held in your hand, but less well on a lowish DPI laptop screen that’s much further away from your eyes. Lucida Grande is specifically designed for use on a computer display; Helvetica is a print face, first and foremost.)

In radically lowering the contrast and tearing out the chrome, Twitter for Mac has become a disaster for anyone who doesn’t have perfect vision. Apple, with its huge lead on accessibility issues, should be actively discouraging UI moves like this.

Some will argue that Apple has been actively encouraging the creation of non-HIG compliant widgets since 2005 (they have), and thus this new wave of apps that totally ignore their Human Interface Guidelines is both inevitable and encouraged. That argument is based on the disingenuous conflation of something that is app-like with something that is an app.

Most of the widgets in the screenshot below (click for full-size; opens in a new window) are not interactive beyond moving them around the screen:



The majority are used purely for passive display of various snippets of information. Some — Stickies, Stop Dashboard, Address Book, and Facebook — are interacted with, but in incredibly shallow fashion, and with minimal possibility for error. With Stickies, I click somewhere on the note and start typing; I can delete what I type, and retype if I choose, but no more. With Facebook, if I click on one of the notifications, it launches the corresponding post in my browser. With Stop Dashboard, I click the button and it kills Dashboard. Address Book is by far the most in-depth, but even then incredibly simple: I click the search field, type in a name, and it brings up matching address book entries.

The above usage scenarios are incredibly narrow and focused: app-like rather than actual apps. A full-blown app — even one focussed on the single task of using Twitter — is inherently much more complicated and, as such, requires a more codified and consistent approach to its design to avoid unnecessarily placing the burden of learning new behaviours on the user.

Arguing over issues like lack of HIG-compliance fundamentally misses the problem with Twitter for Mac, however: the app is badly designed for unimpaired users, and a disaster for the visually-impaired.