‘Let’s do things differently’ is an oft-repeated phrase. How many times have you really seen something that performs a common activity in a refreshing manner? Different Tack , a new Twitter client, turns tweet browsing from a mundane activity to an engaging and refreshing exercise. The UI interaction in the application almost feels like fanning a deck of playing cards and flipping through them to get nuggets of information. After enjoying the ‘Different Tack’ UI experience, I feel that it is not just different but also intuitive and addictive!

Different Tack was developed in Qt by Fluid Interaction, a Finland based UX specialist company. The application uses patented UI innovation techniques described here. Before I walk you through the details of the application, let’s see a quick introduction video created by the developers.

Below you see the home screen of ‘Different Tack’. There are two main parts of the screen – the ‘tweet information’ area on the top half of the screen and ‘the wheel’ on the bottom half of screen. Interacting with the wheel is easy. As shown in the above video, use your thumb to scroll through the wheel and lift at an item to start interacting with the content. The button at the center of the wheel can be used to go back one menu level.

Starting from the top of the wheel as you move in the counter-clockwise direction, you have options to go to your ‘Twitter Time line’, ‘Search for people’,'Search for keywords from Twitter’, ‘Browse temporary bookmark list’, ‘Settings’, ‘Exit’, ‘Help’, ‘About’, ‘Tweets by dtack’, ‘Your personal Twitter archive’, and ‘What’s happening (Post a Tweet)’.

Below you can see the Twitter time line arranged on the wheel. Each item on the wheel is a tweet and as you scroll through the items on the wheel, the content on the top of your screen changes. The color of an item on the wheel changes to a darker shade to indicate that you have read the tweet.

As you scroll through your time line, if you want to interact with a particular tweet, lift your thumb. Based on the content of the tweet, you can perform several different operations such as – add the tweet to your temporary bookmarks (Note: Bookmarks created in Different Tack are not stored after you exit the application.), open the link in the tweet, re-tweet the item, send a direct message to the tweeter, and check the profile of the tweeter.

If the tweet contains Twitter handles of other tweeters, you can search for tweets that contain this handle. Furthermore, you can also monitor hash tags (#) that are mentioned in the tweet. As an example, in the below tweet – you can check the profile of @YouTube and also instantly find tweets that mention #dtack by lifting your thumb over the ‘#’ item.

Also, note the intuitive coloring scheme used by the application to denote different activities – green for time line related activities, red for hash tag (‘#’) based grouping and yellow for Twitter handle/source (‘@’) based grouping. If you click the information (“i”) icon on the bottom of any tweet, you can get the profile information of the tweeter as shown below.

Now, you might ask – How to refresh my time line? Just press and hold the center button. The shortcut menu as shown above will pop-up. In this menu, rest and remove your thumb on the ‘New’ item to refresh your time line.

In the below screen shot, the most popular tweet (most re-tweeted) has the longest blue bar associated with it. So, in a glance you can find out what’s hot and happening on your time line!

Different Tack is currently exclusive to Nokia’s new Symbian devices like the Nokia N8 and is free to download from the Ovi store.

The developers say that the application is free on the Ovi Store for a limited time. So, go and grab it now!