Building my first iPad app - refining the idea

So Tumblr is cool. To refine the idea of building an iPad application based on Tumblr service, we need to know what Tumblr is all about.

Tumblr is very simple. You create a blog then you start to post things like texts, pictures, videos, links, sounds, quotes. People can become subscribers to your blog and you can become a subscriber to theirs. As you subscribe to other Tumblr blogs and as people of those blogs posts new things, this become part of your Dashboard (The Twitter equivalent is the Time Line). The more people posts, the most you see stuff in your Dashboard. This is very basic social networking stuff.

The idea of building a Tumblr client for the iPad comes in part because of the lack of beautiful and well designed apps. Take for example imgTumble. This client offers more than just browsing. You can also like pictures and reblog them. You can see pictures that you liked. It makes the application a bit more complex than I would like. Also, the design is quite poor as the content is squeezed in a three columns view which fails to put content at the foremost of the user experience. 

Another example is QuickTumblr client. This one is quite nice as it uses a two panes view inspired by the Twitter client (See more on the subject of using split views on the iPad: Building iPhone Apps: Beyond the UISplitViewController). The user can toss aside the left pane to see more on the left.

There is a few things that I don't like in QuickTumblr. I don't like the tile view, the colour theme and the choice of the font. I would like the pictures tiles to use rounded corners to make things easier on the eyes (see why rounded corners are better then square ones: New Switch Control in IOS5 and Why Rounded Cornors are easier on the eyes).

These observations on the state of affairs of the Tumblr clients for the iPad will help better refine the idea of building my own. On my next blog post I'll explore what could be part of a great Tumblr client that I would like to build myself.