Loren Brichter

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

Early life and education 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. Michael Tempel, his middle school teacher, introduced Brichter to programming with Logo. Brichter was interested in Cocoa during high school and learned C, Objective-C, as well as web programming from his teacher, Chris Lehmann. responsible for making the iPhone's graphics hardware and software communicate. He left the company after the first iPhone 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. 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. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Apple Designer of Year award. From 2010 to 2011, Brichter worked for Twitter, at which point he would sell Tweetie and his company. Upon leaving Twitter in November 2011, 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, 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.

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. 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. 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 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.