Tapity — How to build successful iPhone apps

The Art of iBook Creation

May 2nd, 2012 Todd

Mona Smile

We are quickly learning that creating an iBook involves a new way of thinking. An iBook is really a hybrid between an eBook and an app—it includes text and images like an eBook, but it also allows for all kinds of extra user interactions like an app.

Panoply of skills

What skills are required to create a great iBook? At least these:

Layout/typography
Interaction design
Visual design
Copy editing
Image editing
Videography
HTML5/Javascript programming (to create widgets)

So although iBooks Author makes it possible for anyone to publish an iBook, to make something exceptional requires multiple skills that generally do not all reside in one human being. In fact, the range of skills necessary to create a compelling iBook is arguably broader than that required to create a great iOS app.

iBook UX

And what’s more, the first two skills listed up there—layout and interaction design—actually meld together to be a new category of user experience design here-to-fore unknown—”iBook UX” anyone? One designer must consider how the text, images, video clips, and interactive widgets can work together to create one meaningful, coherent, and delightful experience. Creating this experience involves both specifying interactive widgets and video content that will work well with the other content and placing all of these diverse pieces together to form a superb whole.

How to read an iBook

A big x-factor with this iBook UX business is that we do not yet have much understanding of how most readers/users will interact with a rich, multi-media iBook. We can safely guess that different users will interact differently. Some will likely treat it like a traditional book, reading the text and viewing the images without interruption, then going back and checking out videos and widgets as icing on the cake. Others are likely to do just the “fun stuff”—look at the picture, watch the videos, and try out the widgets—and maybe never read much of the text. Some may actually interact with an iBook “as intended,” reading the text and interacting with each image, video, and widget as encountered. So should an iBook be designed to flow properly in each of these three different interactive modes? Whew! This stuff ain’t easy!

Giving it a go

Anyway, what better way to figure out how to design an iBook than to get some relatively talented folks together with the general skill range mentioned above and give it a go? That is what we are doing with Cleaning Mona Lisa. We have connected with a great author, Lee Sandstead—”the world’s most fired up art historian”—who has a great concept with well-written text and fantastic images. We are adding some Tapity design finesse from our team of in-house designers and interns. And we are hoping for an engaging result that reaches toward the kind of compelling iBook experience that we think iBooks are all about. Watch this space for more specifics on our experience as we lead up to the launch of Mona Lisa.

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Another Big Announcement: Hours

April 25th, 2012 Josh Olson

Hours — an early mockup

Since our next app, Languages, is more or less designed and is now in the programming stage, we’re hungry for yet another adventure. And we’ve already decided what we’re going to do. In addition to Languages and Cleaning Mona Lisa, we’re taking on two new in-house projects. One is Grades 3.0. Stay tuned for more information on that in the coming weeks. But right now I will be telling you about our other new in-house app. We’re really excited about it. And, like all great apps, it begins with a problem.

It’s all a matter of time

Keeping track of your hours can be frustrating and sometimes infuriating.

Every week day we go to work. Most of us are obliged to keep track of our hours. Innumerable small headaches, pains, and inconveniences accompany this. Some find logging hours tedious because they are constantly switching tasks (lawyers, for example). Other find it tricky because they opt to fudge it and may not record their hours until the end of the day or the end of the end of the week; they often cannot remember exactly what they did and when. Everybody does it differently and everybody has their unique woes.

Bosses, employees, and self-employed entrepreneurs all wrestle with this issue: how to reduce the tedium and trickiness of time-tracking to an absolute minimum.

Is there an app for that?

Yes—sort of. There is a throng of time-tracker apps. But in our experience none of them are satisfactory. We have tried to use a number of them, only to abandon them in favor of timesheet and pencil. We find that generally the cure kills more than the disease and the side-effects are worse than the sickness. There is no alpha dog in this space.

We have identified three areas that none of our competitors deals with successfully:

1. Starting, stopping, switching between tasks and remembering to do so—all via a simple and coherent interface.

2. Identifying errors and fixing them. All the apps now make it extremely difficult to edit your time once you record it.

3. Back-end integration with billing and invoicing systems such as FreshBooks.

Where we come in

We believe that it must be possible to create an hours-tracker app that is simple, intuitive, and simultaneously powerful. Having failed to find any such app available today, we have decided to make it ourselves. We want to create an app that will cover as many use-cases as possible—from the programmer who switches tasks twice a day to the lawyer who switches clients continually. We want to serve the meticulous time-tracker as well as the guy who fudges it. And we want to do all of this via a UI that is clear, crisp, and delightful.

That is the vision.

And we’ve decided on a name. In keeping with our other product names inspired by Apple’s Pages—Grades and Languages—we are calling our time-tracker “Hours.”

We are already deep into interaction design and are laboring on it furiously in the hopes of launching it ASAP. Now back to work!

No Comments » Posted in Announcements, Hours, Tapity, iPhone App Design, iPhone App News

Our First iBook

April 18th, 2012 Josh Olson

Screen Shot 2012-04-17 at 2.36.12 PM

We like to try stuff out. For example, three years ago Jeremy felt like trying out app development; and the rest is history. You never know what will happen when you try stuff out, but it can open up whole universes of possibility that you had never seen or known before.

So it is in the spirit of trying stuff out that we are creating our first iBook. Yes, we do not know what will come of Apple’s newly opened up iBook platform. We think, but are not sure, that the iBookstore may soon become analogous to the Music Store or App Store—both in terms of volume and profit. Others disagree. The waters churn uncertainly. But we figure that if we can build up iBook-creation capacity now, when the platform is young, we may be able to profit substantially when it is mature. We want to offer our services to many creative people who can write and want widgets and professionally-edited video to enhance their work.

A digital publishing revolution may be on the horizon. And, to quote Steve, “I skate to where the puck is going to be.”

Lee Sandstead

So, our first book. Actually, it’s not really our iBook—it’s a piece by the world’s most fired-up art historian, Lee Sandstead. Lee is a professor, speaker, photographer of art, and was the host of the Emmy-nominated Travel Channel show Art Attack. The piece we are working with him on is called Cleaning Mona Lisa. As the title suggests, it’s about cleaning the Mona Lisa; and it’s also about all the things that hinder most ordinary people from really appreciating and enjoying fine art.

So where do we come in? We take Lee’s text and images and weave them together in iBooks Author. For this, we had to spend some time trying our hand at its levers and dials. But we’re getting the hang of it. We’re also creating widgets, standard and custom. You’re going to get to do your own digital restorations and clean varnished paintings with the swipe of a finger; so make sure and buy the book when it comes out!

Cleaning Mona Lisa is sixty to seventy percent completed right now. The text is in place. The layout has congealed. Now it’s primarily a matter of editing Lee’s video and completing work on the widgets.

So stay tuned!

1 Comment Posted in Announcements, The Tablet, iBooks

Buttons are not the enemy

April 9th, 2012 Jeremy

I recently called 2012 the year the interface disappeared, voicing my excitement and concerns with gesture-based interfaces. Apps like Clear and Paper challenge us to rethink what is possible with touch. We got pretty excited and designed a completely gesture-based Languages prototype to show people at SXSW. I had the privilege to show the prototype to some folks I really respect — Steve Krug (Don’t Make Me Think), Evan Doll (Flipboard), Jared Spool (UIE), David Barnard (App Cubby), Josh Clark (Tapworthy), and Whitney Hess, to name a few — and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and very helpful (thanks guys!)

After mulling over the feedback with the team, we’ve redesigned the prototype to include some buttons. Here is why.

Buttonless only works for extremely simple apps

Virtually buttonless experiences can delight but that only works when you eliminate not just the buttons but the functions as well. Imagine if Clear attempted to include even half of the functionality of power-user apps like OmniFocus and maintain a relatively buttonless interface; it’s impossible. Why?

Number of gestures: Tap once, tap twice, tap and hold, swipe left, swipe right, swipe up, swipe down, pinch out, pinch in, twist, drag a part of the screen… Without buttons, there are only so many different functions you can allow with these interactions.
Memory: we can only use a small number of gestures without making user’s brains explode.
Mental model: using gestures for certain functions will feel extremely forced. Gestures only work for functions where the user’s mental model matches how the gesture works. You can help form the user’s mental model using metaphor. If it’s a book, the user expects to drag the page to flip it. Users can easily grasp gestures where they are directly manipulating objects like that but many functions are so abstract that you will be hard-pressed to find gestures that feel natural for them.

So part of the genius behind Clear wasn’t just the gestures but the minimalism, without which the app would break down. There is obviously a market for these kind of minimal apps but that route generally excludes power-users who will complain of the lack of functionality. That’s fine for cases like Clear where a large enough percentage of the population doesn’t need power features but you need to question whether that’s the case for your own app before making the decision to go the minimalist route.

Buttons are not our enemy. They are not as satisfying as directly manipulating objects with gestures but in interfaces that accommodate more than a few simple functions, they are often very necessary in order for the interface to make sense.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that buttons may be the best way to teach gestures, especially when considering making our apps accessible (which, I know from first-hand experience, Apple’s App Store managers pay attention to *very* much). More on that later.

That said, our new Languages design is very much gesture-driven but includes buttons where gestures don’t make sense or to supplement less-obvious gestures.

My mind is exploding with thoughts on gestures and I plan to write a lengthy article that covers gestures in depth, with some ideas on how to best teach gestures as well. In the mean time, check out Josh Clark’s great talk, entitled Buttons are a Hack.

4 Comments Posted in Languages, iPhone App Design

iBooks 2—much more than meets the eye?

March 19th, 2012 Todd

On January 19, Apple held a media event in New York City to announce iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the new iTunes U. Apple billed the event as being all about replacing physical textbooks and announced that most of the major textbook publishers were on board. Apple showed off rich interactions that would put traditional physical textbooks to shame, and priced at $14.99 or less. Apple’s spin was that this was the beginning of the end of traditional textbooks. Perhaps.

But we at Tapity were all atwitter (though we didn’t tweet much) for a different set of reasons:

There is nothing limiting iBooks to textbook publishing.
iBooks Author would be free, allowing anyone to create iBooks (well, anyone with a Mac and a little word processor experience).
iBooks Author makes is relatively easy to create relatively good iBooks with relatively little effort.
The iBookstore would accept all kinds of books from all kinds of people, allowing anyone to publish iBooks.

So—hold the phone—iBooks can compete with all published books, and anyone can be an author and a publisher at virtually no cost. Whoah. No publisher in between author and customer. Whoah. Did you get that?

In our view, iBooks 2 + iBooks Author + iBookstore = a new Wild West of publishing. And not only that, with interactive widgets, iBooks can also be a much less expensive way to create certain kinds of iPad applications, particularly ones that are primarily about presenting content. And not only that, iBooks could become a platform for publishing all kinds of other highly-interactive crazy stuff, from fancy ads to annual reports to digital album extras to college course catalogs to user’s manuals to movie promos to…you get the idea.

But Apple is not promoting iBooks the way we are talking about it. Curious. Consequently, the explosion of iBook publishing that we are anticipating is happening in slow motion. We believe it is happening, and we want to be part of it (more on that later), but there is still time to get in on it. We plan to be talking about iBooks a lot more. Stay tuned.

3 Comments Posted in iBooks