Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Twitter for Mac Returns

Twitter:

The new Twitter for Mac app is here! We’re rolling out an updated Twitter experience made especially for those of you on Mac. Available in the App Store.

Christopher Wong:

The new @Twitter for Mac app is truly one of the funniest (read: worst) pieces of software I’ve ever used. Screenshot below of the full screen compose window.

Project Catalyst seems like an unmitigated disaster

Mario Guzmán:

I mean, naturally, you drag a slider with your finger or holding down on the mouse... Well, that’s what I was trying to do with the slider in the Twitter iPad app for Mac... didn’t go so well. LOL #Catalyst

Ben Sandofsky:

Twitter’s new Mac app uses less than half the memory of the website, and the experience is way better.

Owen Williams:

Wait so Twitter made a Mac app using Apple’s ‘Catalyst’ tool for converting iPad apps.... and it’s...worse than their Progressive Web App? Color me surprised, the iPad app sucks too.

Matt Birchler:

Text selection in the new Twitter app for Mac is insane.

Nolan O’Brien:

A lot of engineering went into bringing the full iOS feature set over to Mac in a very tight timeframe.

There are definitely areas to follow up and improve. We’ll keep iterating and making things better, but in the meantime, check out some of the great features Twitter for Mac offers

Photo uploads get a real boost on Mac. WebP, HEIC and TIFF images now supported in addition to PNG, JPEG and Twitter for Mac supports up to 4096x4096 photo uploads, that’s 16 megapixels!

You can view those UHD images on Twitter for Mac too, of course!

We’ve added support for multiple composition windows at the same time with the ability to resume them if you quit Twitter before you Tweet.

Drag & Drop of photos and GIFs feels very natural on Mac too. We have some work to do for copy & paste of images into composer, so look for that improvement in future iterations too.

[…]

And lastly, don’t forget all the great features that Twitter for iOS has that have never been in a native Mac app before, all here from the get-go. 🥳

Previously:

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

I keep thinking back to this moment in the iPad 3 introduction: https://youtu.be/z5yCqaf9yBc?t=1301

Tim Cook: "This is a Twitter app on […] Android. You can see it's pretty basic...it kind of looks like a blown-up smartphone app. That's because it's exactly what it is! Compare that to Twitter running on iPad...

"And here it is for Yelp. Note...it looks like a stretched-out smartphone app. Lots of white space. Tiny text. It's kinda hard to see. Compare that to Yelp running on the iPad. Clearly designed to take advantage of the large canvas."

@vitner
I am going to slam Tim Cook, Apple developers, and the whole user base on that topic! I've used Android apps for years and I had iOS devices before Android devices. The former generally works perfectly well on most screen sizes because most developers had the good sense not to optimize for a single screen size and single resolution. The latter? Hahahahaha! Nope. I had an iPad 3 and not wanting to repurchase the same apps as HD versions, I used the older apps. HD? Nah, that was a lie anyway. The original iPad was only 1024x768, and while the iPad 3 was "retina" it simply quad bumped the pixels for an effective resolution of 1024x768. Not HD. Sorry. I hate marketing.

Anywho, so I would load an "iPhone/iPod touch app" and the damn thing would just float in the middle of the screen, within a sea of blackness, or it would zoom up and become blurry. Apple's whole design for iOS and its apps were broken from the start because they freaking hard coded sizes and resolution into layout. My goodness, how long ago did the Mac become able to understand more than a 9", B&W, 512×342 resolution? Also witness why app management, multitasking, task switching itself, notifications, and the like were so broken for many releases. The original iPhone could not do much and so everything layered on top felt like a kludge based on working around the limitations of the original iPhone.

If Apple wanted to hammer Android, it should be on how broken SD storage is on the platform. For a time, you could send your apps to SD storage. Yay! Then you could not. Boo! Then you could kind of send things over, but not really. Confusion. Finally we had Adoptable Storage where the microSD card, if fast enough, could be added to the same pool as internal storage. Yay! About time! However, many OEMs disable the feature so you have to buy larger capacity devices at purchase time, shades of Apple. Triple boo!!!

@Vitner
Also, your point was excellent, but Apple's marketing has always been a moving target. If Apple lacks a device or feature, they downplay its importance. Once Apple has it, and they think the experience is best in class, now the device or feature is the most important consideration.

Now that Apple has a crappy, non native app experience on the Mac, it is totally okay. Solely because they control the toolchain, but before, non native equaled bad. I would pretty much pay no mind to anything Jobs, Cook, Schiller, and the rest have said at press conferences, trade shows, or ever, really.

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