Buzz Andersen and I made a (now retired) Twitter app called Birdfeed. Today, Buzz writes about our mock-up of the (now ubiquitous) pull-to-refresh feature, which we never ended up shipping. There are three reasons I’ve never talked much about this:
- The idea was 100% Cabel Sasser’s, not mine or Buzz’s.
- It was an unimplemented idea, which qualifies it as “a thing barely worth talking about at all”.
- Mentioning would make it seem like I was bitter about Loren stealing it from us etc. Nothing could be further from the truth, in every way.
Simple ideas like this will naturally occur to many people. A small percentage of those will have the ability to execute on them. A small percentage of those will then actually do so. And an even smaller group will combine it with an otherwise interesting product, thus making it into something.
Pull-to-refresh is a good idea. Having photo pickers offer to use the Last Photo Taken is also a good idea. The world benefits the most from having these ideas available for actual use.