Loren Brichter
Brichter in 2012
Born (1984-11-15) November 15, 1984
Manhattan, New York
NationalityAmerican
Alma materTufts University
OccupationSoftware developer
Known forTweetie, pull-to-refresh, Letterpress
SpouseJean Whitehead
Parents
  • Gabor Brichter (father)
  • Christina Sidoti (mother)

Loren Brichter (born November 15, 1984 in Manhattan, New York) is an American software developer who is best known for creating Tweetie and the pull-to-refresh function. After atebits, his self-founded company, was bought by Twitter, Inc. in 2010, he developed a word game for iOS called Letterpress.

Early life, career, and personal life

Loren Brichter was born in Manhattan, New York, on November 15, 1984. He is a son of contractor Gabor Brichter and real estate entrepreneur, restaurateur, and designer Christina Sidoti.[1] Brichter was first introduced to programming by his middle school teacher, Michael Tempel, with Logo.[2] He was interested in programming with Cocoa during high school,[3] and learned C, Objective-C, as well as web programming from his teacher, Chris Lehmann.[2] Brichter is married with Jean Whitehead, and together, they have three children.[2]

Tufts University

Brichter attended Tufts University where he intended to study Computer Science. He then switched his major from Computer Engineering to Electrical Engineering. He graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. He was offered free masters by the university, which he declined so that he could start his career. Prior to his graduation, he had considered dropping out early due to a job offering from Apple at the beginning of his senior year. However, his family and his girlfriend convinced him to reject it so that he could graduate. Later on, he then got a new offer to work on the then secret iPhone and iPad project, which he accepted and worked on after he graduated.[2]

Career

From 2006 to 2007, Brichter worked at Apple as part of a five-person team[4] responsible for making the iPhone's graphics hardware and software communicate. He left the company after iPhone 1.0 was complete. From 2007 to 2010, Brichter founded his own company, Atebits, in 2007, and released a small drawing app for Mac known as Scribbles.[5] Brichter then released his second app, Tweetie, in 2008, where the pull-to-refresh interaction technique was invented. In the same year, Brichter also co-founded a company Borange.[6] In 2009, he was the recipient of the Apple Designer of Year award. From 2010 to 2011, Brichter worked for Twitter. During this time, he sold Tweetie along with his whole company in 2010.[7] Upon leaving Twitter in November 2011,[1] Brichter refounded Atebits, different company which utilizes the same name as his startup from before. Atebits then released a word game app Letterpress in 2012, which was later sold to Solebon in early 2016. One of the reasons for the app's name was that the whole game operates with letters being pressed by a player's finger.[8] After his time on Twitter, Brichter was asked by Mike Matas, an ex-colleague at Apple, to help with Facebook Paper, an app Facebook was developing,[9] which later released in 2014. Although Paper did not incorporate the pull-to-refresh gesture that Brichter invented, the duo created new gestures and ideas for the project. Brichter's current plans include advising a few companies and spending most of his time working on his own projects.[2]

Atebits

Atebits was first founded individually by Loren in 2007 after he left Apple, later being sold to Twitter in 2010. In 2012, following Brichter's departure from Twitter, he started a new company with the exact same name as before.

Atebits' first app was Scribbles,[5] released in 2007. It is a basic drawing app for the Mac, inspired by MacPaint.[3] Scribbles uses a hybrid vector rendering engine. As a result, resizing, scaling, zooming, and exporting images at high resolution can all be done with no reduction in quality. The app also allows users to share their illustrations with one another through integration with the Scribbles Gallery. Scribbles was Brichter's first attempt at building a custom UI framework.[3] In 2008, Atebits released Tweetie, a Twitter app for iOS. Tweetie for Mac followed in 2009.

After Brichter re-founded the company, Atebits released Letterpress in 2012. Letterpress is a multiplayer word game that connects players using Apple's social gaming network, Game Center. Although Letterpress is one of Brichter's more recent creations,[3] he only managed to get to work on after he left Twitter. When Brichter first created the game, his wife was his first beta tester,[8] and the rules of the game evolved from beta tests. In early 2016, Letterpress was sold to Solebon.[10]

Tweetie

Tweetie was launched in 2008, and it was created to fill the absence of an in-house Twitter app for the Apple iPhone platform. Later on, in April 2009, Brichter also released Tweetie for Mac. Tweetie for both platforms was acquired by Twitter a year later.

Borange

In 2008, Brichter founded Borange with Mason Lee and Martin Turon while he was living in Berkeley, California.[2] The company has created two apps, the first being Borange, a social availability app that enables users to keep track of their friends’ activities through a social timeline view on their mobile device. The second app, Textie, is a free messaging app across mobile devices. Both apps under Borange were released before push notifications or iMessage were introduced, creating a need for them in the market.

Interaction techniques

Pull-to-Refresh

Brichter is the creator of the pull-to-refresh gesture that first came out on Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone. The gesture allows a user to pull vertically downwards on a touchscreen before releasing, to allow the page to refresh as opposed to former methods of pressing a refresh button. This gesture has since then been adopted by many apps on mobile devices, such as Mail in iOS.

Cell Swipe

Cell Swipe was also created by Brichter and released in Tweetie. The gesture involves swiping a cell off the screen to reveal a set of hidden icons and features.[11] An example would be the cells in Tweetbot, where swiping them reveals options to retweet, reply and so on.

Sliding panels

The idea of sliding panels first emerged in Brichter's creation of Twitter for iPad where the panels would be horizontally stacked and swiped in by gesture. The panels of data that are swiped in created layers of tweets, people, and information that allow a user to browse increasingly more information[1] while keeping their last state and path back. This feature is also currently adopted by other apps such as the mobile Facebook and Spotify apps.

Vertical list icons

Other than gestures, Brichter has also introduced vertical list icons that first came out in Tweetie for Mac 1.0. This design is a vertical list of icons by a border of the screen that displays the different tabs that users may navigate through in the app. This pattern has since been employed by some Mac apps such as Slack and Tweetbot.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Ritchie, Rene (5 June 2013). "Hall of fame: Loren Brichter and Tweetie". iMore. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Brichter, Loren (April 21, 2016). "Email Interview with Loren Brichter" (Interview). Interviewed by Samantha Lee; Sijia Zhang; Jenna Choo.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Ritchie, Rene (14 November 2012). "Loren Brichter talks Apple, OpenGL, Tweetie, Letterpress, and the future of interface". iMore. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  4. ↑ E. Lessin, Jessica (March 17, 2013). "High Priest of App Design, at Home in Philly". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  5. 1 2 Appleyard, David. "Scribbles: Simple, Intuitive Drawing for Mac". appstorm. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  6. ↑ "Borange". Borange. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  7. ↑ Kincaid, Jason (10 April 2010). "Twitter Acquires Tweetie". Tech Crunch. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  8. 1 2 Brichter, Loren (October 24, 2012). "A Conversation With Loren Brichter" (Interview). Interviewed by Federico Viticci.
  9. ↑ Hamburger, Ellis (3 February 2014). "This just in: Paper is the best Facebook app ever". The Verge. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  10. ↑ Hall, Zac (2016-07-20). "Letterpress word game lands on the Mac as Skype drops support for older OS X versions". 9to5Mac. Retrieved 2023-12-09.
  11. ↑ Bunton, Cam. "Don't know who Loren Brichter is? You should!". Today's iPhone. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
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