See Twitter Through a Designers Eye with ‘Leaf’, by Surenix and iPlop
The Creator of Benchmark iOS Themes Brings a Fresh Twitter Experience
Twitter has become a large part of our daily tech lives. It’s where a lot of conversation starts, and often the only place you can stay up to date on certain types of news. While it may be true that a lot of people are happy to settle for Twitter’s official app, most enthusiasts need more. If you search the App Store for ‘Twitter’ you will see no shortage of third-party clients, some are premium and others free.
Leaf, by Surenix and iPlop, is a beautiful new take on browsing everyone’s favorite 140 character social media site. With a simple and clean user interface and a focus on ease of use, it should be perfect for both casual and power users alike.
Surenix (Thientam Bach) is a well-known designer in the jailbreak community. With two very successful fully featured themes and icons for the evad3rs and their evasi0n7 tool, he’s not exactly a lightweight. Ayecon and then Ayeris, his two themes, are still regarded as the best by many to this day. You can follow him on Twitter and check out his site here.
iPlop (Sophia) is a developer who aside from working on Leaf with Surenix, is porting a Nintendo DS emulator to iOS and eventually Android called Nitrogen. She works for Twitter and is also probably a ninja (her own words). You can follower her on Twitter and check out her beautiful website here.
Experience the Dark Side of Twitter
It is not an uncommon thing nowadays for apps to include a Night or Dark Mode, some even have scheduling features to activate and deactivate it at certain times of the day. With Leaf, they considered the problem from a different angle. You’re actually able to set it to activate based on your devices screen brightness.
This way, if you have Auto-Brightness enabled, Leaf will switch to Night Mode if you are in low light conditions yet it is still day time. When you walk outside though, it will switch back to regular for a better experience.
Features like these that set an app apart from the competition and make it worth the price. It’s easy to tell that there was a lot of thought put into the creation of Leaf.
Leaf Packs an Essential List of Features
Browsing through your Twitter feed with Leaf is a pleasure, to say the least. By combining the photo or video attachments together with the text, each tweet takes up less screen real estate. The end result is an elegant experience with more information at a glance than other apps.
Conversations are displayed differently than other Twitter apps as well, with the most recent tweet being at the top. This actually makes sense from a user experience standpoint. This is how your main feed is laid out, why would conversations be any different?
Here is the list of key features listed in the app’s description:
- 3D Touch support
- Adjustable font sizes
- Auto Dark Mode
- Breathtaking interface
- In-app notifications
- Inline media/gifs
- Lists (create, edit subscribe)
- No Advertisements
- Multiple Twitter accounts
- Push Notifications
- Stream Over Wi-Fi/cellular
- Timeline Filters (Mute, Silence)
- Tweet Marker
- WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) interface
Leaf also lets you do other common things like edit your profile, search for users and tweets, quick reply to notifications and even attach multiple images to a tweet. There are still a lot of features planned, with ‘this is only the beginning’ being in the description in iTunes.
Leaf’s Settings are Beautifully Laid Out
There are stunning icons for every section in settings. You can tell that every icon was considered in relation to its corresponding cell. The cells are grouped into two sections:
General
- Streaming – toggles for:
- Timeline Streaming
- Stream on Cellular
- Pin To Top
- Display
- Automatic Night Mode – has a slider for adjusting the brightness level you want Night Mode to come on for.
- Font Size – a slider for font size.
- Filters – here you can create muted or silenced filters
- Push Notifications – toggles for
- Notifications
- Mentions
- Favorites
- Direct Messages
- Follows
- Retweets
- Quoted Retweets
- Connection Status – shows the status of their push notification server
- Tweet Marker – an award-winning, cross-platform web service for syncing the reading position between multiple Twitter clients.
- In App Notifications
About
- About Leaf – at the top are the avatars and names of the Twitter accounts for Leaf for App Support, iPlop the developer, and last but not least Thientam Bach or better known as Surenix.
- Acknowledgements – lists people who helped with the development.
- Libraries Used – lists code libraries used.
- Contact Us – pops up a new email message to support.
- Stop Bug Reporting – enables an impressive bug reporting feature.
Leaf Delivers on it’s Promise of a Fresh Twitter Experience
At the end of the day Leaf is an amazing app with a great user experience. At $4.99, it may be a bit on the expensive side at first glance, at least when you compare it to other apps in the App Store.
Yet, Leaf is not those other apps. It was created with purpose and intent, it strives to simplify the Twitter experience in a new way while keeping the features we all know and love.
You can check it out on the App Store today here: