DesignAday

Google’s App Gains Cachet

I’ve had Google’s app on my iPhone since it was released, but I have rarely used it. I thought of it more as a gimmick than a useful feature. In case you aren’t familiar with it, I’ll provide a brief explanation. After launching the app, you can raise the phone to your ear and speak a word or phrase that you wish to search for. The application listens to your speech, transcribes it, performs the search, and returns the results. I suppose it could be handy if you are on the move and need to look something up, but don’t want to stop to type. I think I have used it in such a fashion once or twice.

I was recently writing something in which I wanted to use the word “cachet,” but I couldn’t remember how it was spelled. All I could think of was “cache,” but as that is a different word with its own meaning, it kept me from using the auto-complete feature in my dictionary widget to find “cachet.” I knew how to pronounce the word, and Google’s app came to mind. I turned on my phone, spoke the word, and sure enough, Google promptly returned a list of results containing the word “cachet.”

Update: Something happened to the second half of this post when I saved it. I just discovered that it was incomplete and have re-written it. I’m sorry for the incomplete post.

Foiled Again!

Please excuse me for wrapping up the week with another post related to my new MacBook Pro. It probably seems rather quaint to all of you that have been using laptops, but I am rubbing my wrists, freed from the shackles of a desktop, so it’s on my mind.

I’m on a short business trip and will be participating in a meeting with a customer. I have a few slides to present and can finally do it from my own laptop, rather than handing somebody else a thumb drive. I stopped at Tyson’s Corner on my way here to visit, as I understand it, the very first Apple Store and pick up a mini display port to VGA adapter, so I can plug into the projector. I happily created my slides in Keynote, instead of that other program, and I purchased the Keynote Remote iPhone app. It’s a nifty little tool that lets me control the show over a WiFi network. You just swipe to change slides backwards or forwards. It also displays your notes, if you need them.

I was quite satisfied with myself. Then I realized that my meeting is on a military base. I’m not allowed to have my phone in the building.

I guess I’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.

Flashing the iPhone?

For whatever reason, Apple has not allowed an Adobe Flash plug-in on the iPhone. If you visit a website that has Flash content, tough beans. You’ll see a box with a big “no” icon. I must also assume that Apple has disallowed a Flash player iPhone application, as that would be a no-brainer for Adobe. Now Adobe has done something really interesting.

Flash has become a standard platform for many reasons, one of them being that it is accessible to designers. We don’t need a degree in computer science to build interactive applications using it. Adobe is leveraging that advantage by turning Flash Professional CS5 into a development environment for iPhone applications. You can build an application within Flash just as you currently do for the web and then export it as an iPhone app that can be submitted to Apple’s App Store. And this isn’t theoretical. At MAX 2009, they demonstrated several apps built in a prerelease version that are currently available for download on the App Store. A public beta is planned for later this year.

This is going to open up iPhone development to an even wider range of developers. I think it was a brilliant move on Adobe’s part. Flash could very well become the most popular platform for iPhone development.

Update: Okay, maybe it isn’t so interesting as I thought. You don’t have access to any of the native iPhone UI. That means you have to implement everything in Flash: swiping, pinching, momentum-scrolling, etc. Good luck trying to get the exact feel of native applications. Here’s more information about the limitations from Jeff Rock (and a tip of the hat to Daring Fireball for pointing it out).

Cursed Cursors

I’ve done a fair amount of UI design for applications intended for use on tablet PCs. That means that the software is running on Microsoft’s tablet version of Windows. It has a number of additional features, such as a pop-up keyboard and handwriting recognition, that is specific to stylus and finger input. Typical of Microsoft, however, they haven’t really thought through the details. One thing that has always bugged me is the cursor. If I’m using a stylus, I have no need for a cursor whatsoever. The cursor is a stand-in for direct manipulation. That is, it represents your finger when you have to use something like a mouse to interact with the UI indirectly. On a touch screen, you can tap things—there is no click.

The cursor is superfluous, yet Microsoft left it there. Every time you tap, the cursor jumps to that point on the screen. This often leaves it hovering over a button, and what does that end up doing? Well, for one, it partially obscures whatever icon or label is on the button. Even worse, it usually causes a tooltip to pop up, as the cursor just stays there. The tooltip remains, covering whatever portion of the display it happens to cover, until the standard timeout is reached, or until you tap somewhere else, moving the cursor to a new location. Tooltips are not an interaction design pattern intended for touch interfaces. I guarantee you will not find tooltips in the iPhone UI.

I received email today from Apple’s App Store advertising the latest iPhone apps. I got excited to see that LucasArts has released The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition for the iPhone. The original was the very first game I purchased for the Macintosh—my LCII. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and I was ready to buy it, but I read the reviews first. Every one that I read complained about the UI. Apparently, they didn’t adapt the UI for the iPhone. Rather than just tapping things, you actually have to drag a cursor around the screen!

Epic Fail!

Designer’s Toolbelt: The Typography Manual

There are a very few iPhone applications I have paid for so far. The most recent is a resource specifically of interest to designers. The Typography Manual combines, as the name implies, a typography manual with a conversion table, em calculator, rulers, and a number of references.

The manual is 60 pages covering type basics, history, typesetting, and web typography. It also includes a style guide, type anatomy glossary, and a handful of typeface specimens. From the little that I have perused, it appears to be accurate and well written. It includes photos and illustrations, especially effective for the type anatomy. It is fairly basic and shouldn’t be thought of as a replacement for a good typography book, but it seems appropriate for what it is—a pocket reference. It is missing one important feature, however. While some sections, such as type anatomy, provide a search field, there isn’t a manual-wide search capability.

There are a number of useful references that are provided under “Resources”, rather than as part of the manual. A conversion table lists inches (in fractions and decimals), millimeters, and points. Another table presents HTML character codes. There is a table of standard paper sizes and one for web banner dimensions. There are also lists of periodicals, organizations, type foundries, blogs, and other web resources.

I question the usefulness of the font size ruler, which lets you drag a slider to resize a line of text between 5 and 47 points. You can display the sentence in either Georgia or Helvetica. I have trouble getting it to recognize that I’m trying to drag the slider. The standard ruler also seems relatively useless. It displays an image of two rulers with markings for inches, centimeters, points, and picas, but I can’t imagine using it for any practical purpose.

The Mac keyboard characters utility is a bit more functional, displaying a keyboard on which you can tap the modifier keys to see what characters become available on the regular keys. The em calculator works as expected, allowing you to enter pixel values for font size, line height, and element size, and displaying the corresponding em values based on your setting for the browser default.

My biggest complaint is that the UI doesn’t behave as it should. When you scroll to the end of a page, it doesn’t bounce. Flicking a page doesn’t have the same momentum as standard apps. Scrolling lists don’t have the alphabet shortcuts on the right edge. Rotating the phone doesn’t have any effect on the content display.

All things considered, it is a robust app. The visual design and organization is quite good. It will be particularly useful to a student, or a designer that wants to brush up on their type knowledge. And the developer has promised additional functionality in the future, so there is even more type goodness to come.

It’s Hip to be Foursquare

The other day, I wrote about my disappointment with Booyah, the iPhone app that claims to be an achievement system for real life. I wasn’t very impressed with it. Foursquare, on the other hand, sounds a little closer to something interesting. I tried it out, but they don’t have a Pittsburgh edition, so I wasn’t really able to use it.

The idea is that you check in while at various locations around a city. Every time you check in, you earn points. Interesting check-ins earn badges, although I wasn’t able to figure out what constitutes “interesting”. I earned a “Newbie” badge for my first check-in. An example check-in would be something like, “@ IHOP eating a waffle”. In addition, you can track things that you want to do or have done around the city, but I wasn’t able to discern how or if this works into the scoring.

Foursquare has implemented a reward system that not only assigns badges, but ranks you against other players. Their website lists “mayors” for each city, so there is obviously some kind of competitive leader board mechanic. This has a lot of potential, but as far as I can tell, the goals are still too loosey-goosey. I expected to find a list of things to do already there. Then I could earn points by checking them off. Even if the list were built by the users, but shared, that would introduce a competitive aspect that is more than just counting the number of times you check in.

This is another very interesting example of game design being applied to “real life”, but it doesn’t seem to be as sophisticated yet as it could be.

Booyah? I say boo.

I got excited when I started reading about the new iPhone app Booyah Society. It’s a great example of a cross-over that brings aspects from computer gaming and applies them to other aspects of life. About a month ago, I wrote about incorporating a rewards system into productivity applications, and I specifically mentioned the Achievements system in World of Warcraft. Booyah claims to be an “achievement system for your life”.

The premise is that you record your activities in the application, and it rewards you for them. It gives you a way to “level up in life”. I immediately imagined a wide-ranging array of goals, categorized by type, such as “Travel to Australia,” “Receive a Promotion,” or “Take a 10 mile hike.” They would range from the extreme—“Climb Mt. Everest”—to the mundane—“Read a book.” The app is, somewhat surprisingly, free, so I downloaded it to try out.

First I customized my avatar. That bit seems completely unnecessary to me, but okay. Then I checked out the achievements.

• Food Flicker - Earn by writing 1 Food & Dining Post
• Food Firestarter - Earn by writing 3 Food & Wine Posts within 2 Days
• Food Torchbearer - Earn by writing 5 Food & Dining Posts within 3 Days

At this point, I realized that it is completely based on micro-blogging. You make inane posts to Twitter, Facebook, or just on Booyah about whatever you happen to be doing. The only goals set up are to make more posts and get comments from others.

I’m vastly disappointed by the direction they decided to go with this. This is one of the endeavors that received some of that venture capital Apple talked about when they first announced the SDK. They had the opportunity to do something really interesting here. It could have worked as motivation for people to lose weight, quit smoking, do volunteer work, get involved in good causes, see the world, etc. Instead, all it does is promote people writing more about stuff that doesn’t matter so much.

Now, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be hugely successful. I expect it would be very popular among people that already use Twitter. I’m obviously not their target audience. And, perhaps, they have plans to expand it to be a much grander game, as I have described. Or, maybe they’ve left an opportunity on the table for some other enterprising person to capitalize on.

Designed for Mobility: Pure-Fi Anywhere 2

My wife and I both enjoy listening to podcasts and audiobooks in the morning while showering and otherwise making ourselves presentable. I had been using an old pair of computer speakers. They sat on the floor under the counter with a mess of cords, and I would have to search for the end that plugged into my iPhone. Finally, I decided to give Susie iPod/iPhone docking speakers for Valentine’s Day.

I did a fair amount of research, as there are many options. I had a few major requirements, including price, visual design, and portability. I wanted it to be something she could easily take with her to use other places—around the house, as well as her office, the lab, or our church. I settled on Logitech’s Pure-Fi Anywhere 2.

This is an outstanding product for many reasons, but I want to focus on the fact that it was very specifically designed to be portable. Sure, the legs that keep it from falling over fold in—that’s an obvious consideration—but there are some truly thoughtful details.

It has a 10 hour rechargeable battery, so it may be used where outlets aren’t handy. It comes with a very nice, padded, cloth case that includes an interior pocket to hold the remote. The power supply was designed to allow the cable to wrap around it. And the detail that most impressed me is that the power supply and wrapped cord fits perfectly in the recessed space where the iPhone docks, allowing it to be packed in the case also.

Hello, my name is…

Ever since Apple announced the iPhone App Store, I’ve been wanting to develop applications for it. But, given all of my other activities, finding the time to learn Objective C might take until retirement, or at least until the kids are in college. I’m quite happy to say that one of my developer friends recently purchased a Mac Mini. We’re teaming up.

I took some time while I was on vacation last week to start designing our first app, which I’ll have more to say about in future posts. But to get started, we of course have to register with Apple as developers. To give both of us access to Apple’s developer resources, we’ll need to register as a company. To register as a company, we need several things, including a name and a website. Picking a name for our company is going to be more difficult than designing the app.

Of course, the first consideration is an available domain. That in itself is a challenge these days. On top of that, we’ll want a name that doesn’t get changed by, say, Microsoft Word’s automatic spelling correction. We also want one that is easy to spell over the phone—a lesson I’ve learned from reciting my current business email address. The company I currently work for is named “Inmedius” (which has its own story). “N as in Nancy—M as in Mary…” And in addition to these practical requirements, I’d prefer something that is meaningful and clever, as opposed to, for instance, “MonkeyDog”. That’s taken, by the way.

The first idea that I took a liking to, Youtility, is unsurprisingly in use. Youtilitarian is available, but that’s stretching things a bit. I’m rather envious of Tapbots. That’s a great name, and plays perfectly into the apps they have developed so far.

I’m a creative person. I know I can do this. But feel free to send any suggestions my way.

3.0h yeah!

I spent some time last night kicking the tires on iPhone OS 3.0. I still have the original iPhone, so I don’t have access to all of the new features, but overall I’m quite pleased. It is noticeably faster than the previous version—especially load times for webpages.

The first thing I did after the update was to run through all of the preferences, and I’m glad I did. All of the new features, from Find My iPhone to synching of notes, were turned off. That seems like a poor default choice. How many people will expect the new features to “just work” and wonder why they don’t?

Of course, the first feature I tried out was Cut, Copy, & Paste. The feature works as advertised, and it’s hard to imagine a better solution. The one inconsistency that I imagine is bothering somebody over there is that a double-tap will select text in every application except for Safari, which has been using that action to zoom. To access the capability in Safari, you have to bring up the magnifying glass.

I’m glad that they are finally providing the landscape keyboard in all of the applications, as it is much faster to type with two thumbs than a single finger. I can’t hold the phone and use my thumbs in the portrait orientation—it’s too narrow. I’ll likely be more verbose in email and SMS.

It’s hard to pick a favorite new feature, but the auto-fill in Safari is in contention for that honor. I depend on it so much on the desktop that my wings are clipped when trying to do things on my phone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have synched over the login data, so it will be awhile before I’m getting the full benefit.

Spotlight Search is fast—enough so that, depending on your current location in the UI, it may be quicker than opening the address book to find someone. It even searches the content of mail that is on the phone.

One change that confused me briefly is that the address book and calendar apps make a distinction between content that has been synched from the desktop, and that which is synched from MobileMe. The first time I opened the address book, all of my contacts were doubled. I was afraid a synching error had a occurred and opened up Address Book on my Mac to see if they had been duplicated there as well. Finding that they had not, I explored further and discovered that the phone allows me to view only the contacts from one or the other, and now that I’ve selected the desktop source, it seems to always open in that view. The calendar works the same way.

It’s a small thing, but there was one more change I noticed that is a big improvement. The very first time I tried to purchase music on my iPhone, I was on a business trip, and I wanted to get Marc Cohn’s new album to listen to during the drive home. When I attempted the purchase, it told me that there was a new Terms of Service Agreement that I would have to accept, but that it would have to be done through iTunes on my Mac. I couldn’t purchase anything until I got home. Well, while I was fooling around with the new OS, I told it to download updates to a couple of apps. I got an alert about a new Terms of Service Agreement, and then it allowed me to review the agreement and accept it.

I wouldn’t say it’s like having a new phone, but for a free update, I’ll take it. I’ll get the new phone in a few months when my finances have recovered from purchasing the new car, new video camera, new lawn mower, etc.