Loren Brichter
Loren Brichter is an American software developer who is best known for creating Tweetie and the pull-to-refresh interaction. After atebits, his self-founded company, was bought by Twitter, Inc. in 2010, he developed a word game for iOS called Letterpress.
Early life and education
Loren Brichter was born in Manhattan, New York, on November 15, 1984. He is a son of contractor Gabor Brichter and real estate entrepreneur, restaurateur, and designer Christina Sidoti. Michael Tempel, his middle school teacher, introduced Brichter to programming with Logo. Brichter was interested in Cocoa during high school and learned C, Objective-C, as well as web programming from his teacher, Chris Lehmann.Brichter attended Tufts University, intending to study Computer Science. He then switched his major from Computer Engineering to Electrical Engineering and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. He was offered free masters by the university, which he declined so that he could start his career. Prior to his graduation, he had considered dropping out early due to a job offering from Apple at the beginning of his senior year. However, his family and girlfriend, Jean Whitehead, convinced him to reject it so that he could graduate. Later on, he then got a new offer to work on the then secret iPhone and iPad project, which he accepted and worked on after he graduated.
Career
From 2006 to 2007, Brichter worked at Apple as part of a five-person team responsible for making the iPhone's graphics hardware and software communicate. He left the company after the first iPhone was complete. From 2007 to 2010, Brichter founded his own company, Atebits, in 2007, and released a small drawing app for Mac known as Scribbles. Brichter then released his second app, Tweetie, in 2008, where the pull-to-refresh interaction technique was invented. In the same year, Brichter also co-founded a company Borange. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Apple Designer of Year award. From 2010 to 2011, Brichter worked for Twitter, at which point he would sell Tweetie and his company. Upon leaving Twitter in November 2011, Brichter refounded Atebits, a different company which utilizes the same name as his startup from before. Atebits then released a word game app Letterpress in 2012, which was later sold to Solebon in early 2016. One of the reasons for the app's name was that the whole game operates with letters being pressed by a player's finger. After his time on Twitter, Brichter was asked by Mike Matas, an ex-colleague at Apple, to help with Facebook Paper, an app Facebook was developing, which later released in 2014. Although Paper did not incorporate the pull-to-refresh gesture that Brichter invented, the duo created new gestures and ideas for the project. Brichter's current plans include advising a few companies and spending most of his time working on his own projects.Atebits
Atebits was first founded individually by Loren in 2007 after he left Apple, later being sold to Twitter in 2010. In 2012, following Brichter's departure from Twitter, he started a new company with the exact same name as before.Atebits' first app was Scribbles, released in 2007. It is a basic drawing app for the Mac, inspired by MacPaint. Scribbles uses a hybrid vector rendering engine. As a result, resizing, scaling, zooming, and exporting images at high resolution can all be done with no reduction in quality. The app also allows users to share their illustrations with one another through integration with the Scribbles Gallery. Scribbles was Brichter's first attempt at building a custom UI framework. In 2008, Atebits released Tweetie, a Twitter app for iOS. Tweetie for Mac followed in 2009.
After Brichter re-founded the company, Atebits released Letterpress in 2012. Letterpress is a multiplayer word game that connects players using Apple's social gaming network, Game Center. He started Letterpress once he left Twitter, Inc. in November 2011. When Brichter first created the game, his wife was his first beta tester, and the rules of the game evolved from beta tests. In early 2016, Letterpress was sold to Solebon.