Edible Apple

Loren Brichter is sort of a legend in the iOS app developer community. After working on the original iPhone while at Apple, Brichter left the comfy confines of 1 Infinite Loop to pursue life as an independent developer. One of his first projects out of the gate was Tweetie, a Twitter client that quickly became a runaway success and saw the introduction of features – such as pull to refresh – that soon became commonplace in the industry.

In April 2010, Twitter acquired Tweetie and re-branded the mobile app “Twitter for iPhone”. Brichter also joined the workforce at Twitter where he put his talents to good use. A little more than two years later, Brichter left Twitter to pursue other projects, the first of which was the recently released game “Letterpress” which if you haven’t checked out yet, you better get on it.

In any event, Brichter recently sat down for a talk with GigaOm where the former Apple engineer discussed a number of topics, including his views on the recent ouster of Scott Forstall. Put simply, Brichter is pumped about Jony Ive’s new role in the absence of Forstall.

I’m excited about Ive” taking over the Human Interface group at Apple, where he will lead both industrial design and the design of the software that runs on it. “He has good taste.” He paused. “But more important than good taste, he has the ability to” — he points to the MacBook Air in front of me — “he’s true to the materials, to the medium he’s working in. One of my complaints about design of iOS is it’s doing things that aren’t true to the hardware.”

“My design goals with Letterpress were to do things that the graphics hardware was really good at. [Ive] is the kind of person who has the same aesthetic. It’s not superficial — he’d think about [the design of iOS and an iOS device] all the way through” not just make something that looked good, he said.

To date, Letterpress has been downloaded over 1 million times.