Steve Kinney, responding to yesterday’s post on Twitter for Mac:

From the geek perspective, Mike is totally on point. That said, John Gruber is also right. The point is that most people don’t really care. I pointed out the other day that most of us stress way too much over stuff. Koralatov is totally right, Twitter for Mac’s UI craps all over Apple’s HIG. Yep. But it’s still the best Twitter client for the Mac.

The way to look at this kind of stuff as follows: What works best? Then (and only then), what fits into my OS best?

I don’t care how well something adheres to the HIG — if it’s it a turd, it’s a turd. If a Twitter client comes out that’s just as good as Twitter for Mac and follows the standard Apple UI conventions, I will happily switch.

In his response, Steve homes in on two points that perhaps got lost in my original post with its extended tangent involving the HIG.  He’s right that HIG-compliance is, to most, a total non-issue — the majority of users don’t mind if an app looks different provided it performs well, and there’s a lot of sense in that viewpoint.  Getting all bent out of shape over nonstandard UIs is a complete geek-rage pastime, and a mostly harmless one at that.  Sometimes it encourages developers to make better interfaces; most of the time it doesn’t.

I also agree that our primary concern when choosing an app should be trying to find the one that works best for our needs. That’s the reason I’ve used so many different Twitter apps on my phone but always come back to Twitter’s official app. For me, it works best — the fact its interface fits in with iOS’s UI paradigms is just a very welcome bonus.

The real problem with Twitter for Mac isn’t that it tramples the Mac’s UI conventions. The real problem is that, as an app for everyday use, it is worse than the one that it’s replacing, and its interface is the primary reason that it’s worse.

John C. Walsh captures why it’s worse in his post on Twitter for Mac’s UI much more succinctly than I did in my original:

[T]his isn’t about HIG purity, it’s about vision, seeing and functionality. I don’t mind the iOS influence, I mind that the fucking application is harder to use and that things I need to easily see are now hard to see.

Returning to Steve’s second point: for me, the best Twitter app for the Mac already existed — it’s called Tweetie, and even after an extended flirtation with Hibari, I always come back to it. Granted, it’s somewhat outdated and doesn’t support some of the features I’d like it to, but it does all the important stuff so well, and its interface is so carefully thought-out that using it is a frictionless, easy experience. It saddens me that, instead of building upon and refining Tweetie’s excellent existing UI, Brichter et al instead decided to scrap it and replace it with something much worse.

Further Reading

• Tim Morgan’s excellent “The Failures of the Mac App Store’s UI, and That of Its App, Twitter 2.0”;
• Daring Fireball, “Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design”;
• One Thing Well, “UI Consistency”;
• Read the Fucking HIG, “Contrary to What You May Expect…”.