pull-to-refresh
Recently, many words have been shared on the pull-to-refresh action first seen in Tweetie on the iPhone. Gruber just linked to this post quoting the following:
If pull-to-refresh stayed exclusive to Twitter for iPhone, I wouldn’t mind it as much, but like most popular things, my disdain grows as I see more poorly implemented or misguided variations of the feature.
To me this is a hollow argument. You can’t deride a feature for people using it incorrectly. If developers make poor design decisions in their usage or implementation of the pull-to-refresh feature, they are no less likely to make similar poor decisions if the action had never existed. It’s true, implementing pull-to-refresh because it’s the new must-have feature is a terrible idea. But well implemented, as it is in Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone), it’s a well-reasoned feature that shines in both discoverability and usability.