Daring Fireball: Twitter’s Confusing New, but Hopefully Now Abandoned, ‘Home/Latest’ Timeline:

The new feature defaulted to only showing you the “Home” timeline, but gave you an option to put a tab controller atop your feed with two options: “Home” and “Latest Tweets”. You could either tap or swipe to switch between them. But by default, the Home/Latest Tweets header wasn’t shown, and you only saw the algorithmic Home feed, with no indication that there was an option to switch. You had to go into the cryptically-iconned “✨” menu (the “sparkle menu”?), and tap “Pin your Latest timeline”, which was described thus: “The latest Tweets from people you follow will be one swipe away from Home.”

First, I had no idea what the hell the “✨” button did before this. I didn’t even know it was a button. What a bizarre icon for the options to control the essential nature of how you view Twitter. Not to be too cynical, but it feels like this icon choice was driven by a desire to hide this option while maintaining plausible deniability that the option had been hidden. “It’s not hidden or buried in settings — it’s right there in the sparkle!” The whole thing felt like using a Twitter app in a bad dream where you can’t figure out how anything works.

I don’t even install Twitter’s own app on my devices, it’s a sin against UX and sanity on the best of days… But if I had to use their interface and this was permanant, I’d have dropped it like I did Facebook. As is, if they ever stop supporting 3rd party APIs I’m probably out.