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Twitters new and blazingly fast interface

jacquesmattheij.com

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: Twitters new and blazingly fast interface

#54
The old UI had its issues, but it was much faster than the new one. Issues I see on a daily with new Twitter:

- There're a lot of little weird inefficiencies if you use the keyboard - for instance, if you expand a tweet, space bar no longer works to continue scrolling down the page unless you tap over.

- Scrolling can be slowwww. Can't scroll back more than 3 hours or so in my timeline, without getting an infinite loading animation or no option to continue viewing at all. This was especially a pain for me when I was on PDT, it meant I basically couldn't catch up with the early EDT news unless I switched to my mobile client.

- "You've already tweeted that." "Sorry, we couldn't X, please try again later." and so on...

Then there's the search overhaul, which actually bummed me out a lot more:

- Now, search results continually default to "Top" instead of "All," requiring a manual change.

- Tweet translation's been removed. :(

- Interface suffers the same issues (infinite loading spinner) that plague the new Twitter interface. The old search interface was really stripped down and fast.

I love Twitter, it's been super-important to me both personally and for my business; but I really would pay a subscription fee to get some efficiency back into my daily morning Twitter routine (i.e., ++scroll-speed, at least 48 hours of search history, bring automated tweet translation back, multiple account support). $5/month would be a serious bargain, especially considering these features would give me an extra hour or more back every day.

Re: Twitters new and blazingly fast interface

#55
post #19
post #18

I really am curious as to why the new interface works so absurdly badly. It's not even a question of being a bit slow, the thing uses constantly 90% of my cpu (I'm using a low end netbook), which makes it technically unusable, and it's not like it does that much work. Hell, it just print a timeline. The only thing missing from the mobile interface is a basic auto-refresh function.

My guess: bad programming, using big frameworks and implementing cool and overhyped features that don't matter. Unlimited scrolling is nice, but not necessary. Dynamic loading of content is nice, but not necessary. And the list goes on... The mobile website is what Twitter should be.

To those of us who border on OCD, unlimited scrolling is not nice; it is an anti-feature. If HN added new content every time I scrolled to the bottom, I don't think I'd get anything done.

Re: Twitters new and blazingly fast interface

#56
post #52

does twitter still use mostly ruby? i remember hearing something about scaling problems that were supposedly caused by ruby.

The "new" interface is actually entirely JavaScript and just exchanges JSON with an HTTP endpoint. This removes a big chunk of "slow" in Rails, which is view rendering. Of course, the actual services behind this endpoint could be based on Scala or Rails or any other language and are probably heavily cached.

Re: Twitters new and blazingly fast interface

#57

I don't get the bitching about the new UI. What is he talking about when he says "pages that take several minutes to load"? Is he talking about the regular twitter.com UI? It loads in less than a second and is otherwise completely responsive.

Except when the API is overloaded, which is often. Then Twitter.com just spins for a long while and gives a message about trying again while failing to load your tweets at all.

If you are lucky. I often get the Twitter header and a blank page.

Re: Twitters new and blazingly fast interface

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when the API is overloaded, which is often. Then Twitter.com just spins for a long while and gives a message about trying again while failing to load your tweets at all.

If you are lucky. I often get the Twitter header and a blank page.

I get that all the time but it seems to be a problem with Chrome. Some people say clearing the cache would fix it but that doesn't work for me. I have no such problems in Firefox though.

Re: Twitters new and blazingly fast interface

#60

I don't get the bitching about the new UI. What is he talking about when he says "pages that take several minutes to load"? Is he talking about the regular twitter.com UI? It loads in less than a second and is otherwise completely responsive.

In what is probably a related but separate revamp effort, the mobile site is no longer usable on my phone. It just spins and spins, and I'm not the only Android user that has this problem.

Not to mention what a pain it is to try to go back to where you were before which, while irritating on the desktop if you forget to open a new tab, is a significant disruption on the phone.

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