iOS 6 - some very interesting stuff for me

The more I look into WWDC 2012 videos and the more I think about my Tumblr Photo browser application development, I think I might start with iOS 6 as the minimum iOS requirement. There are so many new APIs and Xcode new features directly related to making developer's life easier. By the time I finish working on release 1.0, I suspect there will be more iOS 6 than any other iOS versions.

Building my first iPad app - looking around for inspiration

In my last blog post on building my Tumblr client, I have stated what would be part of the first release of this application. Now it is time to search the App Store for great applications with similar objectives and see how they are visually presented.

One of the web service that I like is Dribbble, a web service for graphic designers to let them present their work. You can find amazing stuff made by great designers there. I really like the visual look of this web site which is very clean. There is one iPad app made for browsing the content on Dribbble which I like: Dribbblr. the design of this Dribbble client is inspired by the web site design. 

Dribbblr is something I like to use myself. The design of this application is very inspiring me for my Tumblr client. Basically, this is a very standard iPad application using a toolbar at the top of the screen, the rest is for the content. This kind of application is easier to create than a customized split view like the Twitter client.

Here are a few things that I like in this Dribbblr client:

• Content is king, controls are few;
• White borders around each pictures (would prefer to see rounded corners though);
• Nice background (white borders around pictures could also allow a darker background which I think I would prefer);
• The page navigation at the bottom is also very nice (except for the colour of the handle which comes from the Dribbble visual signature);

But, I feel the pictures layout is not really what I like most from this application. This week, I came across a new application called Mixel. After playing a few minutes with it, I found many things that I would like to re-use in my own application for Tumblr.

In Mixel, the density of content is higher, three times more pictures are displayed compared to Dribbblr application. They both uses shadows from elevated pictures corners to add some depth. Mixel presents pictures with rounded corners albeit with very small radius. Under each pictures you'll find the author, comments counter, like counter, favourite counter and the date. Browsing in this view is done by sliding the finger from the bottom to the top.

The other very interesting view  is the single picture view shown next. It is presented when the users is taping on a single picture.

This single and centred picture view with previous and next partially shown pictures is very interesting to me. First, browsing is done horizontally and the users get a visual cue of what will be the next picture and what was the previous one. Next, pictures are bigger and actions can be done on them by tapping one of the icon at the bottom. This could be pretty much the same layout principle that I could use for my Tumblr client. But, for the 1.0 release, comments at the bottom wouldn't make it as I see that less relevant for picture browsing.

Another design cue that I could take from Mixel comes from the use of the Share button at the bottom right of the icon row. Pressing this button makes the picture flip in order to reveal social networks where the picture can be shared to others.

This view could be done differently though. Why not just dim the picture and present the controls over? If the picture is dimmed very low and the controls very dark with a little white surrounding this could be a nice way of acting on the picture which would be in line with one of my design principle for this application: make the content the centre of the user experience. The user could still see the picture while executing actions on the them.

The other thing about Mixel is the use of space in the layout. There is large and unused space surrounding pictures. I would increase the picture size for better content presentation.

Together, Dribbblr and Mixel applications seems to embody visual design principles that could be the basis for my own Tumblr client. In my next blog post on this subject, I'll try to come up with a design myself. 

Building my first iPad app - beyond the initial idea

One on the thing that Steve Jobs helped us to understand is to try to build products that we would like to use ourselves. So, what could be part of my own Tumblr client?

In my quest to create a very simple Tumblr client, the next step is to define what this simple client should do on the 1.0 release. We cannot start the next design steps without a very descriptive application description. So, what this 1.0 release should be able to do? What goals should I try to achieve?

• Put the content (the pictures) at the centre of the user experience (pretty much like QuickTumblr or Dribbblr);
• Browse only pictures (skip blog posts with media type other than pictures because I want to create a Tumblr image browser);
• Browse Tumblr without user authentication (without authenticating the user, the application could still allow browsing of Tumblr blogs in general something the API seems to allow);
• Authenticate the user to the his Tumblr Dashboard;
• Logoff the currently logged in user;
• Think that at some point the application could support to show one picture in full screen mode;
• Design the application in a way to allow more interaction features with other Tumblr functionality eventually in a future release (liking blog posts, rebloging to followers, saving pictures the the camera roll, seeing blog post comments, etc.)
• Support all iPad orientations;

As you can see, this will be a very basic Tumblr client. By making it this simple, I'm aiming to be honest with how much work I can put into this as I'm not a full time iOS developer. My resources are also very limited. 

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.

Writing my first iPad app - ideas

I've been writing iPhone apps since 2009. Since then, the iPad came out. The reason I first started to write iOS apps was that I was curious about how things worked behind the scene. So I created three apps (search "ultimate password manager" on the app store for more details). Now, I'm a bit blasé about my current apps. I'm still working on them to make incremental improvements but I'm looking for ideas for the iPad platform. I don't won't to port my apps on the iPad because the market for password managers is way over crowded and my time is limited. So I have to pick and choose something less crowded and in line with what I think I can achieve.

I'm a big fan of Tumblr. I love their wed site and their iPhone client. I know they love the iPhone and Apple market in general by looking at their http://engineering.tumblr.com/ page, I know for sure they are iPad fans too.

Tumblr is already available on the iPhone but not on the iPad. The idea is that I don't want to create an iPad version of the Tumblr client. There are a few available on the iPad but they really sucks big time. So, this is it. I would like to build a very simple yet beautiful Tumblr client for browsing their content. The kind of thing I would like to achieve is something close to this Dribbble client called Dribbblr. In my next post, I'll explore in more details how I started to look into this matter and what the Tumblr browser for iPad could have in version 1.0.