August 8, 2009 Comments Off
Henry and I are super pumped to both be holding sessions at the upcoming 360iDev conference in Denver next month! Henry will be speaking about iPhone app marketing strategies for developers and I’ll be giving a talk on user experience. The list of presenters is very impressive and I’m sure all of the sessions will be jam packed with valuable info!
You can find more details about the conference at 360idev.com. If you’re planning on going– make sure to drop in and say hi! I’m looking forward to meeting as many fellow iPhone developers as possible! Whoop!
I’ve read through the Apple HI guidelines for iPhone multiple times, gathered a few resources for bickbot’s newsletter and stumbled across a few really great apps with bad ass interfaces. I think one of the main reasons the iPhone’s been so successful, is some of the beautiful UI’s the designers/developers have created. So I decided to share a few of my favorites.
Here’s a list of my top 5–
1. EDGE (developer site)
Edge was by far the best time I’ve had early on with an iPhone game. You could tell Mobigame’s put a lot of thought into control and UX. At the time, it offered a tilt control option and gesture based control– I immediately fell in love with the gesture based controls, they just seemed to make sense while playing. This is in addition to their lovely “8-bit” menu system and sounds.
2. Convertbot/Weightbot (developer site)
Tapbots really, IMHO, are probably the best UI designers in the iPhone app business at the moment– they are who I strive to beat in my designs. Tapbots know that the user experience is just as important as actually getting stuff done with their app– Their apps BLEED UX and gorgeous UI.
3. Eliss (developer site)
Another game. The reason I choose Eliss is– it’s the first time while playing an iPhone game that I actually envisioned myself living in the future. LOL– this is the type of UI I imagined I would be using when I was younger– a simple, natural, multi-touch interface. Check it out– you will be amazed.
Could you imagine manipulating spreadsheet data this way on a larger tablet device or table top? Uh– yes.
4.Birdhouse (developer site)
Adam Lisagor & Cameron Hunt have done a beautiful job creating non-standard UI elements (that look like standard UI elements) and integrating them with their twitter client. Some of their custom stuff really looks like it should be included in the iPhone OS’ standard UI toolkit.
5. Twitteriffic (developer site)
Developed by Iconfactory– isn’t that enough information? They make some of the best Mac OS X applications– and it obviously shows they understand what makes the iPhone platform so important. Again, very clean UI elements that look like they should be part of the standard iPhone UI.
I wanted to show off BickBott’s first iPhone app to our community, so the obvious choice was to do a video of me talking about/using the app itself. I could have just pointed my camera at my iPhone’s screen and talked through the app, but I wanted something more professional. Turns out it wasn’t too hard to pull off…
- Set your desktop on your Mac to something simple (I just used solid gray, but Apple has some nice pre-set colors in system preferences to choose from).
- Launch XCode and compile your app for the iPhone Simulator.
- Minimize everything except the iPhone Simulator to the dock.
- I used ScreenFlow to record my “iPhone” which is $99, but you can also use TechSmith’s free Jing app to accomplish the same basic thing. Jing has less editing capabilities than ScreenFlow, but it still gets your demo across to your users.
- ScreenFlow has a lot of editing and multi-track layout features (I was able to put our app icon in, my twitter icon, and some basic info about myself into the video).
- Now, if you want to be one of the cool kids, here’s a ScreenFlow tip! You can change the shape of your cursor AFTER you’ve recorded your demo. I changed mine to the classic iPhone demo circular “finger tap” cursor (you know the one) to polish off the demo and make it look more professional.
- Choose your favorite video sharing site (we like Vimeo) and publish your app demo.
When creating an interface mockup of your application there are a few resources that are key to streamlining the design the UI in your application. Here’s a few tools we use to mock ours up before coding…
Teehan+Lax iPhone GUI PSD
This contains editable versions of the iPhone OS’ standard interface elements on their own layers.
Learn More
LiveView by Nicholas Zametti
This allows you to “screencast” a view of your interface from Photoshop directly to your iPhone’s screen over your local network.
Learn More
iPhone Mockup by Lukas Mathis
Quickly create sketches online of your ideal app interface.
Learn More
The iPhone has no new features. The iPhone is not the first phone to have music, video, internet, address book, calendar, and the ability to check the weather.
In fact, if you look at the feature list of a Blackberry before the iPhone, you’ll find it does the same things.
But what’s different? Why is the iPhone infinitely better than the Blackberry?
Continue Reading
