Even for a company whose entire service is based on real-time communication, this is some fast action. Just five days after making a considerable update to its app for iPhone and iPad, Twitter has bowed (slightly) to crowd complaints about the “Quick Bar” by altering its visibility in the middle of the stream: it will no longer overlap tweets in the timeline. Lovingly dubbed the #DickBar by angry Twitter users, the Quick Bar was promoted as a minor aesthetic change that introduced trends into the stream. Upon first loading the Twitter app, users would see the Bar displayed near the top of the screen; once the user started scrolling, the Bar would (strangely?) disappear and be transported to the top of the stream. Users could cycle through trends by swiping left and right. There were at least two major problems with the Quick Bar. For one, it covered up tweets. When the Twitter team went to redesign the main website for #NewTwitter, the utmost importance was placed on preserving the sanctity of the stream. Don’t mess with it, it’s what makes Twitter wonderful.
Secondly, the Bar just wasn’t well-made, it didn’t seem to want to stay put. It would show up on launch and then with a glitchy little flicker just vanish. Confusing.
Finally, because of the aforementioned design flaws, some figured that the Quick Bar was just Twitter’s rushed solution to get more Promoted Products into the mobile stream. Sure enough, Promoted Trends were showing up in the Bar. And when you start covering up tweets with paid advertising, you have to expect users to get pissed.
After you update to the latest Twitter release, the Quick Bar will still be there, but it will no longer cover up tweets. Besides the Quick Bar fix, the new app version fixes crashing issues, security issues and increases performance for users with multiple accounts.