Former Apple Employee Loren Brichter is Excited About Jony Ive's Promotion

Loren Brichter, the creator of Letterpress and Tweetie, sat down with GigaOm to talk about developing iOS apps, the App Store, and more.

Brichter was a member of Scott Forstall's iPhone team early on, and though he didn't have much to say about Forstall's ouster from Apple, Brichter did have positive things to say about Ive's promotion:

"I’m excited about Ive" taking over the Human Interface group at Apple, where he will lead both industrial design and the design of the software that runs on it. "He has good taste." He paused. "But more important than good taste, he has the ability to" — he points to the MacBook Air in front of me — "he’s true to the materials, to the medium he’s working in. One of my complaints about design of iOS is it’s doing things that aren’t true to the hardware."

"My design goals with Letterpress were to do things that the graphics hardware was really good at. [Ive] is the kind of person who has the same aesthetic. It’s not superficial — he’d think about [the design of iOS and an iOS device] all the way through" not just make something that looked good, he said.

Brichter also disclosed that Letterpress has been downloaded more than 1 million times. Additionally, he developed his own version of the user interface framework -- bypassing Apple's UIKit -- because he "wanted to try."