Alterplay

We’ve released new product recently. It’s called Debty. It helps to manage debts of your friends. There is a banner at the right top. If you want a promocode please request it on the twitter.

The goal was to develop something easy to use with limited features. Developing it we’ve got some useful ideas I want to share.

Design

The very custom design was also required. After a few hours of research Jeans style was chosen. I hope you’ll like it.

Beside it’s really hard to develop and support custom designs, now I see it’s too custom. App design should be more simple and less like “cartoon”. Too much details, textures and volumes are pleasure to look first 3 times, but then they detract from the main thing – functional parts.

No matter how much your design is custom or unique or extravagant, you have to abide by the law of HIG (Human Interface Guidelines). It means your controls should be right sized and placed, e.g. buttons in the UINavigationBar, and you may still use the same navigation principals with UINavigationController or UITabBar. etc.

OK-message sucks

As less OK-messages you have, better your application is. Means you shouldn’t notify user “Your tweet is posted. Press ok to continue.” – use sound notification instead or “Profile is saved” – show some small animation in saved block instead.

So just take every OK-message from your app and ask “is it really required?” and “How could I notify user without OK-message?”. You’ll see how easily you invent some new approaches. Nobody says it’s easier, but worth that.

I think that’s a different between User Interface and Human Interface.

So please look this next short. There are some tiny animations which we are proud of.

• “Enter an amount” and “Select a debtor” OK-messages are replaced by soft vibration of inputs
• View and Edit views are combined in one view which transforms with animation to one state to another. Yes it’s like Contacts.app does.
• Every date has human representation like “Today”, “Tomorrow”, “3 months delay”, “refund in 8 days”. it’s changed on the way while editing.

The best UI is absence of UI. It’s so much natural to not require time for adaptation.

An idea of useful iphone app took my mind for several hours. The idea is simple: notify users when there is a new refurbished product in Special Deals section of Apple Online Store.

The ideal is to push notifications to users, but this approach requires server side with a kind of spider. It’s more than a late night experiment target.

I spent a little time and made a prototype which parses products from apple.com. Of course it takes time to load html pages.

In common there may be a lot of apps with similar functionality, but you should know what Apple officially thinks about it. It will exactly violate section 3.3.7 of the iPhone SDK Agreement:

“Applications may not use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect information about users for any unauthorized purpose. ”.

There is even a real example of rejected app. But note, it’s a really useful app.

It’s strange feeling when good ideas is doomed, a little easier when it have not being developed yet.

Anyway I wish you quality ideas and dreams!