Sorry folks: Beak, my fledgling, ever-unfinished Twitter app for the Mac and iPhone is dead and will never be worked on again. Why? Please let me explain.

Beak's Beginnings

The first line of Objective-C I ever wrote was for Beak. Starting out in the world of Mac development with a Twitter app is pretty ambitious and I learned a lot. I didn't know what delegates were until I started using MGTwitterEngine. I never knew how to build custom AppKit user interfaces either. I never opened Interface Builder before I started designing Beak's (underwhelming) Preferences window. In short, I cut my teeth on Beak and it shows. It was never really polished, nor did it represent any kind of best practices for Mac development; the main interface component is a WebView so that says a lot by itself. It was my learning tool, my first trek into Cocoa development.

Why I'm Done With It

I have a full-time job working on the web and Cocoa development is my evening & weekend passion. If I'm lucky I'll have a solid 2 hours at night to crank on some code, but many nights it's less than an hour, or no time at all. Building a fully-functional Twitter app is hard and it takes a lot of time. To build a nice offering in the market you have to implement the same 30 features as everyone else and then after that you can start to differentiate. Ever heard of a Twitter app without Favorites? Or Direct Messages? There are a bunch of things you absolutely need or else people complain. Heck, I still get a few emails a week about Beak not saving your password. (Hint: I didn't forget about that feature, I just didn't know how to store anything in the Keychain when I first wrote it.)

Besides lack of time, I broke the golden rule: I didn't build an app that filled my own needs. I don't use Beak. I never used Beak. I also never used Twitterrific or Tweetie or any other Mac Twitter app. I use the Twitter website. Why? Because my primary usage of Twitter is for finding new links and I read those in a browser. I don't like being in a desktop Twitter app, clicking a link, being transferred to Safari, reading an article, then switching back to my timeline in a different application. It's just how I use Twitter. Everyone uses it differently, and I'm probably the oddball here, but that's just how it is. Perhaps if I made Beak a gigantic, full-screen application with a built-in web browser I would've used it.

My third reason is simply a lack of interest in long, time-sucking projects. Like I said before, I do Cocoa development on the side, as a hobby, and as such I like to be entertained and to feel motivated. Dragging along to build an app for months isn't exciting to me. I like tiny projects because they keep me excited and I can always see the light at the end of the tunnel. Digital Post was a nice, concise project. I spent about 40-50 hours of work to build the 1.0 version. I could envision the entire project in my head at all points, so I was always shooting for the finish line. These kinds of projects just fit me better and they keep me motivated, excited and pushing hard at all times. It seems like a simple concept but it's taken me years to understand what motivates me and what doesn't. Beak 1.0 for Mac and, recently, Beak 1.0 for iPhone were both so complex their launch loomed far in the distance, like a mirage I could never run fast enough to touch.

Lots Of UI, Not As Much Code

I'm a designer. More specifically, I'm a user interface engineer. I design software and then I implement these designs. The main reason I write software is to make my mockups clickable and real. I have 50+ PSDs of never-implemented Beak interfaces. I have dozens of NSView & UIView subclasses with prototyped custom interface components ready to be hooked up. My brain and mouse would rush ahead to knock out the user interface and UI code but then, time after time, I'd get sidetracked and bogged down by network code, error-handling, API issues, memory leaks, 45fps scrolling instead of 60fps, caching code written & rewritten, complex text layout problems, etc. I'm good at solving these problems but after spending night after night tweaking and rewriting non-UI code I'd just get burnt out and would ditch Xcode for Photoshop just to give the other side of my brain something to latch onto. Then, inevitably, I'd start designing the UI for the next big Beak feature and would get frustrated knowing that I still had the previous feature to finish before I could move on.

Thank You

Over 30,000 people have downloaded Beak since it first debuted, a number that's just incredible to me. Even with all its flaws I still get emails and Twitter replies from people who think it's fantastic. It sounds crazy, but Beak made people think of me as an app developer and no longer just a web designer. It completely revitalized my skill set and realigned my career trajectory. It taught me Objective-C and made it possible for me to build an iPad app that launched Day 1 of the iPad App Store. It opened my eyes to real, double-clickable (and single-tappable) software development that I had never experienced when working on the web. I owe Beak and everyone who ever downloaded Beak a sincere Thank You that cannot be expressed in hypertext. Honestly, thank you.

(To answer a question before it pops up, I have no plans to open source Beak, nor do I want to hand the project off to someone else to finish. It's a project too close to my heart to give away so it will simply die an elegant death on my hard drive and in the cloud where it sleeps at night.)