In my last last post, I wrote about the story of Nano for Reddit, and today I’m writing about the story of Chirp for Twitter.

Where it began

Chirp for Twitter began on the 6th of June. After creating Nano, I got a lot of requests for me to create a Twitter app. At first I didn’t think it’d be a good idea as Twitter were deprecating some key APIs, but as time progressed I wanted a new challenge and I hit New Project.

A couple hours later had my basic timeline working

Shortly after I began working on the UI/UX, which drastically improved very quickly.

The First Beta

The first beta was pretty good, albeit a little rocky. There were a lot of formatting issues

Even when the problem is the last screenshot was fixed, longer price strings would truncate and format weirdly.

During the first beta I continued to add common UI elements from Twitter to the app, such as an indicator for verified accounts.

I settled on changing the name of the poster to blue (it has since also been bolded).

Then I added profiles, getting the profile icon to overlap with a half-rounded profile banner was a little tricky, but I love the effect of it.

The Launch

The launch went spectacularly, just a couple hours after launch, 9to5Mac released an article on it. The support I saw on the first day was absolutely mind-blowing.

One of the most surreal moments during the launch was Chirp being mentioned on a US breakfast show (skip to 2:43).

Chirp then continued to be covered on numerous sites such as TechCrunch, iDownloadBlog, VentureBeat, AppAdvice and many more.

The launch went surpassingly well, even if Reddit didn’t seem to like it nearly as much as Nano.

I was lucky enough to have Martin Moore on Twitter telling everyone (especially news outlets) about Chirp, he seemed to be more excited about it than I was.

Messages

Here you can see that even before Chirp was launched, I had a fully functioning messaging system. Though some of you may remember that 1.0 launched without messages, why was that?

Well the aforementioned API deprecations meant that when I launched, the messages API had less than a month before the API would be disabled, and I couldn’t launch with messages as a Chirp Pro feature if I couldn’t guarantee I would have the new API implemented. I had to make the decision to disable messages in the 1.0 build, until the new API could be swapped in.

I had to work with a developer of the Swifter framework over a couple days (mostly during class) before the new API was ready, but it required a lot of work when it came to the actual implementation.

Fortunately, just 7 days after the initial release, messages (and lists!) were ready to be launched.

Stress

Stress wasn’t nearly as prominent in the development and release of Chirp for Twitter, partially because I was more experienced but also because the entire process took 11 days, so stress didn’t even have time to settle in. In the previous post I wrote all about stress and how I try to mitigate it, but I won’t say it all again, you can read that here.

Thank you

I ended my last post with a thank you too all the people that helped me, and unlike the stress section I will reiterate, as they deserve it.

It’s about 6 months since Chirp for Twitter laughed, and 9 months since Nano for Reddit launched. It’s been the best 9 months of my life and I want to give a special thanks to a couple of people as well. Firstly, without my parents none of this would’ve been possible, if they hadn’t bought me that Apple Watch for Christmas it’s unlikely Nano (and especially Chirp) would have ever seen fruition. Secondly, I’d like to thank my girlfriend for putting up with my constant nerd talk (because talking about Reddit is so attractive). But from my blog I do get to have fun conversations with her like this one

Lastly, the testers. I now have. Over 150 dedicated testers to help me test every little feature of Nano and Chirp to ensure the consumer gets the best product possible.

Thank you to everyone I mentioned above, as well as anyone who has helped me over the last 9 months.

The End

Thanks for reading! Want to make your own Reddit Apple Watch app? You can follow my tutorial here.