Just as the ipad was launched there was a flurry of app creation, and there seem to be another stream of news apps coming out this year. There have been no great breakthrough in news apps in my opinion, nothing which answers the perceived need for a daily news app. Whether that need exists is a moot point, though is is clear that most news organisations are driven to build core news apps to satisfy the nagging worry that one day they will have to turn off the presses. More on that in another post.
What is also emerging is a first stage of new technical development for iOS, an inevitable stage in the evolution of a platform which has offered huge promise, and with which some deficiencies which have become clearer through use.
For example, some of the enhancements which we want to do to the Guardian iPhone news app require a change in the way article pages are made. They are built using native (objective c) code, and therefore have great performance – fast scrolling for instance, as well as fairly straightforward construction. However there are many things which the
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When discussing this I can see my developer friend’s mixed emotion: pleased at being shot of the problem but already missing the challenges it poses. Anyway, he does manage to point out a drawback: performance. There is a lag – sometimes minimal – in every interaction, and though you can “do anything you like” if you want to replicate the types of transitions which come off the peg in Xcode, you have to create the solutions yourself. And this is particularly problematic when scrolling. iOS has very responsive and natural scrolling. It accelerates, scrolls and decelerates. It bounces when you reach the top or bottom of the scroll, and when you tap on the status bar at the top of the phone you are zipped back up to the top of that scroll.
None of this is quite right in a web view, the scroll is sluggish, the bounce doesn’t work right and tap as you might on the status bar, nothing happens.
So I was interested to read that one of the wizards of app design in the last couple of years, Joe Hewitt, largely responsible for the Facebook iPhone app, has set out to build publicly available tools for web apps (and I guess for web views in apps). The experience of shortcomings for one is the experience for many, and it is exciting to see commonly experienced issues being brought the surface in this way. Hewitts thing, called scrollability for now, sets out to resolve these issues, and I look forward to seeing the results in action.
Hype
The other exciting development this week is the release of an HTML5 authoring tool aimed at the not so technically trained…. Such as designers like myself. The need for a product like this arises out of the lack of flash abilities on iOS products and the growing recognition that HTML5 and CSS3 based web apps and website comsnetnts are a necessary part of the future. This also looks like it could grow into a great tool for prototyping and demonstrating app potential.
It’s called Hype (short-circuiting any complaints about pre-launch excitement and possibly an ironic nod to the huge amount of hope and debate around the emerging standard).
It may seem odd for a designer to attempt to write about these things – but the whole area of production for iPad is in bad need of new tools, on the one hand to address imperfections in web views and generalise the experience of solving basic problems, but also to enable designers to touch the machinery and dabble with concrete examples of the products which we imagine. Having worked in print, working directly on the thing to be printed, this is both a step forward and back. I design for screens and therefore am closer to the medium, yet I rely on others to reinterpret my ideas – more like days of designer and typesetter.
I have heard a flash developer tut at Hype, and i realise that part of this is to do with a criticism of HTML5 etc as being far too backward compared to flash, but we are in new times when so much is being recast, and it’s time to support and encourage new tools. And give this emerging standard breathing space.
But I think his other reason for disdain is that he is there at the code-face…. and is a little scornful of bags of tricks to make it all seem so easy… and he might have a point there too, though from my perspective it is great to be able to imagine trying out a data visualisation or some other interactive without having to wait in line for someone with the coding skills to translate my ideas into reality