Can't believe they went for the same Facebook style launcher, when it's a) used by Facebook b) only got 5 icons c) it's explicitly regarded as bad UI design by Apple (at this WWDC).
Tweetbot's fourth button allows you to rapidly change its behavior, it's fast enough and the best UI I've seen so far.
* None of the back buttons look like iOS back buttons or state where they lead.
* The tab controls are taller than usual, taking up room for no good reason.
* The open in Safari icon looks like nothing I've ever seen and it displays an alert view instead of an action sheet.
* The People view has a tabs on bottom and a segmented control on top. The segmented control is treated as primary (changes the entire view including tabs).
* It takes five taps to get from your stream to the posts of a particular circle.
I am quite honestly surprised that the brainplex released something with this many sharp corners.
I find that hard to believe considering that launcher concept is implemented by Apple in the iOS home screen.
For 5 or less tabs it requires two tabs to browse between tabs, vs. 1 tap for a bottom tab bar that is persistent.
Also as mentioned in the talk the user has just arrived from a launcher, which is why it's poor design to show another one.
I thought you were referring to the launcher style in general as "bad design," not in the context of an in-app sub-launcher which is why it made no sense to me.
As a result, we've seen apps like rdio using the launcher in a way that goes against the user's expectations of how a launcher should work. Instead of zooming the controller in from the center of the screen, the controller gets pushed onto a navigation stack. In rdio's case, they should have built a simple table view with each 'sub-application' having its own row. Tapping one of those rows would then push the controller onto the navigation stack in the same way that it currently does with the launcher.
-- From a holistic user experience applications "spring forth" from the system launcher, creating a consistent feeling of two functional modes in the operating system. The first being finding and launching applications, the second being using the launched application. Introducing a third layer of launched sub-applications complicates that model, oftentimes unnecessarily.