Loren Brichter

Loren Brichter was born in Manhattan, New York on November 15, 1984. He is a son of contractor Gabor Brichter and serial entrepreneur Christina Sidoti.[1] Brichter was first introduced to programming by his middle school teacher, Michael Tempel, with Logo.[2] He then explored further in high school, got into Cocoa programming,[3] and picked up C, Objective-C as well as web programming with the help of his teacher, Chris Lehmann.[2] Together with Jean Whitehead, they have two children.[2]

2006 - 2007: Worked at Apple as part of a five-person team[4] responsible for making the iPhone's graphics hardware and software communicate. He left the company after iPhone 1.0 was complete.

2007 - 2010: Founded his own company, atebits in 2007, and released a small drawing app for Mac - Scribbles.[5] Brichter then released his second app Tweetie in 2008, where the Pull-to-Refresh interaction technique was borne. In the same year, Brichter also co-founded a company Borange. [6]

2010 - 2011: Brichter worked for Twitter during this time after he sold Tweetie along with his whole company in 2010.[7]

2011 - now: Upon leaving Twitter in November 2011,[1] Brichter refounded atebits, which is a whole different company utilizing the same name as his startup from before. The company then released a word game app Letterpress in 2012, which was later sold to Solebon in early 2016. After his time in Twitter, Brichter was also asked by Mike Matas, an ex-colleague at Apple, to help with the Paper app that Facebook was developing.[8] The app was released in 2014. Although Paper did not incorporate the Pull-to-Refresh gesture that Brichter invented, the duo have created new gestures and ideas for the project. Brichter's current plans include advising a few companies, and spending most of his time working on his own projects.[2]

atebits was first founded individually by Loren in 2007 after he left Apple. It was sold to Twitter in 2010. In 2012, following Brichter's departure from Twitter, he started a new company, again using the name atebits. The goal of the company is to create great apps for Apple devices such as iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The company's name is a play on technical words in computer science. "Ate" sounds like "eight," which is the number of bits in a byte. And "byte" sounds like "bite," which, like "ate," is related to eating.

atebits' first app was Scribbles,[5] released in 2007. It is a basic drawing app for the Mac, inspired by MacPaint.[3] Scribbles offers some more advanced features than other basic drawing applications like MacPaint and Microsoft Paint. For instance, it allows for drawing on multiple layers in one image. Scribbles also uses a hybrid vector rendering engine. As a result, resizing, scaling, zooming, and exporting images at high resolution can all be done with no reduction in quality. The app also allows users to share their illustrations with one another through integration with the Scribbles Gallery. Scribbles was Brichter's first attempt at building a custom UI framework.[3]

In 2008, atebits released Tweetie, a Twitter app for iOS. Tweetie for Mac followed in 2009. Tweetie's use of innovative user interface interactions such as Pull-to-Refresh garnered increased recognition of Brichter by the design community.

After Brichter re-founded the company, atebits released Letterpress in 2012. Letterpress is a multiplayer word game that connects players using Apple's social gaming network, Game Center. Although Letterpress is one of Brichter's more recent creations,[3] it has already been in his old to-do list for a while, which he only managed to get to work on after he left Twitter. One of the reasons for the app's name was because the whole game operates with letters being pressed by a player's finger. When Brichter first created the game, his wife was his first beta tester,[9] and the rules of the game evolved from beta tests. In early 2016, Letterpress was sold to Solebon.

Tweetie was launched in 2008 and it was created to fill the absence of an in-house Twitter app for the Apple iPhone platform. Later on in April 2009, Brichter also released Tweetie for Mac. Tweetie for both platforms were acquired by Twitter a year later.

In 2008, Brichter founded Borange with Mason Lee and Martin Turon, while he was living in Berkeley.[2] The company has created two apps, the first being Borange, a social availability app, that enables users to keep track of their friends’ activities through a social timeline view on their mobile device. By allowing users to privately share their recent availability and location with people from their address book, Borange aims to improve the experience of users in arranging mutually convenient times to meet on short notice. The second app, Textie, is a free messaging app across mobile devices. Both apps under Borange were released before push notifications or iMessage were introduced, creating a need for them in the market.