Justin Williams writes, Death To Pull-To-Refresh:

If pull-to-refresh stayed exclusive to Twitter for iPhone, I wouldn’t mind it as much, but like most popular things, my disdain grows as I see more poorly implemented or misguided variations of the feature.

In all these cases, the user has the same interaction of scrolling past the bounds of a table, but each different variation offers a different result for the user. I don’t see how that is a good user experience.

Jeff Lamarche responds, Time Moves On…:

To me, it’s the perfect gesture for the iPhone in apps where you’re primarily consuming small chunks of content in a table, like your inbox or twitter apps. When I’m using apps of this nature, I’m often in one-handed mode, using my thumb to scroll. My thumb can’t comfortably reach the entire screen (e.g. a refresh button in the navigation bar), and I don’t want to bring my other hand over every time I want new tweets.

I have to side with Jeff. ‘Pull-to-refresh’ is a refreshing gesture, especially when you are limited to the mobility of one hand. I think pull-to-refresh would be extremely useful as a system-wide gesture on the Droid X (ha!).