Screenshots of Twitter's internal admin interface | Hacker News Reader

Screenshots of Twitter's internal admin interface

businessinsider.com

88 pointsdanielh54 comments

I will never, ever understand people who have large displays but still run fully maximized browser windows.

It seems a bit half-assed to run these images uncropped... not like they couldn't provide links to the originals.

(a bit OT and negative, but seriously folks...)

What's wrong with running your browser fully maximized? I, personally, cannot stand having a half-screen browser open. Feels like I'm wasting space.

Every single screenshot there has the content padded by about a meter and a half of empty background, though. Many, many websites have stylesheets that do that by default. The same space would fit a separate browser window with the same amount of content (or an editor, etc.).

Also, many people find text that wraps at roughly 70-80 columns or less easier to read than longer lines. (This is probably why the stylesheets set the column width.)

I used to do everything in fully maximized windows (I was using ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/) at the time), but it seemed to make less and less sense as monitors got larger. A widescreen 22+ inch monitor is practically two page-sized screens side by side.

I'm the opposite. I like text to not wrap unless possible. I hate having to scroll down because someone decided to have seven words per line.

Maybe once tiled window managers (something like dwm, xmonad, awesome, wmii) become less obscure?

Don't need to. Look at the workspace of an experienced Mac user (who's using a large-ish display) and you will see that there are almost no maximized apps, and that plenty of different apps share the screenspace at once.

Beginner users (and non-Macheads) hate it, but I've yet to meet a switcher than didn't like it in the end.

It's a matter of paradigms - Windows doesn't really have a lot of inter-app interactions via the default UI, so there's no real need for multiple apps to be visit at once.

> Windows doesn't really have a lot of inter-app interactions via the default UI,

I think you're on to something there. Good point.

Interesting to be reminded of this. I switched a few months back, and it really was a bit painful. I found it hard to concentrate when I could not maximize, and I spent some time trying to find some software that would solve this. By now I had totally forgotten I experienced it as a problem at first.

Haha, that is because you can't maximize on OS X (bloody dock is in the way). SCNR ;-)

You can set the Dock to hide, in which case you can use the full display.

I know - I am hiding on a small display (notebook), but on bigger displays (external) it seems silly.

I switched to OS X four months ago, and while I think it's a great step forward from Windows, it isn't quite the same as a comprehensive tiling manager. I've used xmonad, and it's a dream -- I just haven't made sufficient time to put up the headache of installing it.

Taking two windows, tiling them side-by-side and maximizing them should be effortless. It shouldn't take a fancy hardware set up nor an expensive investment, and it shouldn't be hassle to install. There's no reason UI widgets I don't need should consume precious real estate when I don't need them.

I develop on a 13" MacBook, btw.

I keep a copy of the dwm source (with a few relatively inconsequential patches) in the same git repository as my home directory. It's much less trouble to set up, once you get it configured. (I don't really care for Haskell, though.)

I'm a reasonably experienced Mac User - and I have no idea how to tile my windows. Can't find a utility to manage windows. No way in OS X to do it cleanly. It continues to be the most annoying element of my Macintosh experience - particularly as there a number of great tools in Microsoft Windows (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000928.html) - and don't even get me started on the wealth of WM available for Linux.....

it is not so much about screen real estate as much as jumping from window to window without a mouse. dwm + vim + vimperator = most productive environment. It is very natural to switch between programs all using the same key bindings.

It is amazing, well not really when you think about it, how much faster you become when you dont have to keep moving your hand(s) off the keyboard.

I like to run all apps maximized. That way, I can focus on the task at hand and not be distracted by stuff going on in other apps. Also, less clutter = more productivity.

There is something to be said for that, but IMO you should maybe be using the minimize button instead of the maximize.

You must not develop a website, or you must have a small monitor.

As a web developer. I always run two monitors - one has my emacs, terminals, process manager, and browser, all nicely tiled on a 30" monitor.

On my other screen, I keep iTunes, skype, and other distractions.

I work on a website and I use two 24" monitors. Firefox maximized on one (Firebug takes up tons of room you know!), and screen (with emacs/terminals/etc) on the other.

I think this is more a personal preference thing than anything else. (And I use my laptop for music and IM, but its usually displaying the Vista enter password screen anyway.)

Someday Vista will stop hurting you :)

Someday around June, 2010.

More like 2012

I actually use Vista as a window manager for all my Linux tools. I kind of like it.

You're right. I have a 13" white MacBook.

You don't need to understand them, you just need to know that they exist and there are quite a few of them (us). If you do UI work, design accordingly.

For example: the larger the monitor, the more tabs I can have open on Firefox without having to cycle left and right. I like being able to see all my tabs at once and know where they are.

I also like having Terminal taking up the other monitor, and knowing that it's always there. It's the Terminal monitor. All other applications are minimized, I bring them to the front when I need them and minimize them after. It's like opening and closing the fridge.

I have a 22" widescreen monitor and usually run apps maximized.

It's a rare situation when I have to simultaneously focus on two apps.Why not dedicate screen space to what I am currently working on?

Typical example, web developer with browser (or tool like CSSEdit) open and an editor open.

Or multiple editors open, one for each class.

I'm surprised by how basic it looks. They clearly put the features they needed and didn't go further.

I guess it's a question of priorities: work on something 15 people use, or something 15 million people will use? :)

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's just that it seems that half an hour of CSS would make it cleaner and I'm surprised that nobody at Twitter finished something on a Friday afternoon and thought "ok, let me clean this up a little bit" instead of starting something else :)

Judging by Twitter's uptime record in the past, they probably have had an experience where someone thought that, started coding, and crashed the whole site.

I like making fun of Twitter as much as the next guy, although in all fairness when I saw this graph I decided to give them a little more credit. They're facing ongoing, unbounded growth. I can't claim to have handled that kind of scaling, let alone handled it without a hitch.

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com

(make sure to set the timeframe to 'max' to see what i'm talking about)

They're facing ongoing, unbounded growth.

...on an app that consists of a solved problem (pub/sub). Cry me a river.

Or better yet, give me a million dollars and I'll build you a twitter that doesn't fail. In 60 days. You'll just have to bring the users.

Most admin panels look like that, there is no point wasting valuable time building something "pretty" that noone will ever see.

That's pretty secure if nobody will see it.

I think thats a good reason for web frameworks to consider adding admin interface as a part of the framework. Nobody cares to change much.

Poor PerezHilton every celeb blocks him :( I guess to make his work harder

I'm sure he just uses another "following account"

Can't these by easily unblurred to reveal Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher's email addresses?

Unlikely, but it would be a cinch to determine the number of letters in the address; do a little creative guessing with that value and you could probably find it. Of course, having an interesting conversation with them would likely be a little harder ;)

The addresses are likely for their publicists.

Possible but I'd be surprised if Ashton Kutcher's publicist was using an aol.com email address.

It can, not easily though, I think you've been watching too much CSI... :P

Try googling "deconvolution". This appears to just be a gaussian blur, so it should be trivial.

I really enjoyed these screenshots, and learned more about Twitter in 5 minutes than by reading 10 Techcrunch posts about Twitter combined.

It could make an interesting site even, backendwatch.com (or something else more palatable)

You do seem to read a lot of TechCrunch then ;)

It's in my reader, the headlines are good but that's about it.

"Impersonated by admin."

Ah, good ol' Darth Vader complex.

Wow...According to these screenshots Britney Spears has more followers than Obama.

Not just according to those screenshots. A quick twitter search shows Britney has 1.25M [1] and Barack has just over 1M [2].

[1]http://twitter.com/britneyspears

[2]https://twitter.com/BarackObama

HA! Good point =)

I think Obama stopped using Twitter before the "recommended people" shock happened that multiplied some people's follower counts by 100.

I wonder if someone is going to get in trouble for leaking these...

From the first sentence of the article: "hackers sent them screenshots"

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