Craig Hockenberry

Craig Hockenberry is an American software developer best known as the developer of Twitterrific, one of the first Twitter clients and the app credited with popularising the word tweet. He is a principal of the Iconfactory, the small independent design and app studio behind xScope, Linea, Tot and the feed reader Tapestry.

Hockenberry studied computer science, with a minor in fine arts, at the University of California, Irvine. He spent the 1980s and early 1990s as an engineer at FileNet, including a posting in Ivrea, Italy, then worked at Genasys in Sydney and as director of technology at Educational Insights. He began working with the Iconfactory in its first years, building icon tools such as IconBuilder and later CandyBar, iPulse, Pixadex and the designer's measuring tool xScope.

In December 2006 he started a desktop Twitter client and had a prototype running the next day. Twitterrific shipped in January 2007; on January 12 that year he swapped the placeholder word twit for tweet at the suggestion of Twitter engineer Blaine Cook, and the Iconfactory's David Lanham drew the bird icon that Twitter later adopted as its symbol. The iPhone version, built with Gedeon Maheux, won an Apple Design Award in 2008. Twitterrific ran for 16 years until Twitter abruptly cut off third-party clients on January 19, 2023.

The Iconfactory answered by building for the open web. In January 2024 it launched a Kickstarter for Project Tapestry, a single timeline for Mastodon, Bluesky, RSS, YouTube and more, which beat its $100,000 goal and raised over $177,000 without outside investment. Tapestry launched on the App Store in February 2025. Hockenberry also wrote Making Sense of Color Management for A Book Apart (2016) and blogs at furbo.org.

He matters as one of the longest-serving indie Apple developers: a hands-on engineer at a self-funded studio for nearly three decades, whose work shaped the vocabulary of social media itself.