What I love about this app is the visual history. The panes show you where you’ve been. Surely better than a back button, a list, or nothing at all; especially when the might of Twitter lies in its massive network of simple information. It’s a tidy way to separate threads of information. The panes function as tabs or windows may on a desktop browser. And dismissing them to leave you with the main pane is always just a flick away (I love that icon, and the gesture and metaphor is consistent with the ingenious way to refresh). Composing a new message doesn’t clear what you were previously doing, but instead pushes it aside, ready for you to go back to for reference or once you’re finished.

I strongly recommend anybody with an iPad who’s into Twitter to give this app a good test drive before giving up on it.

But I really like your general message that there isn’t one correct way to design apps, something that bears repeating in the face of the dogma that everything on the iPad has to be minimalistic. And I certainly don’t think “the customer is always right”; it can be useful to adjust one’s own thinking to open up new possibilities. Perhaps you could go into a bit more detail about the specific things you learnt about the Twitter app that made it easier to use after your initial disorientation?