Four Island

In an article arrogantly entitled "If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it," Max Rudberg argues that new-age apps such as Clear pander to the college-aged hipster "intellectual" who likes to have the snazziest apps. His contention is that these simplistic designs, which require a tutorial on how to use them, detract from the user experience rather than enhancing it. My opinion, however, is that Rudberg is confusing gimmickry with innovation.

Clear's UI, while unfamiliar, feels rather intuitive to me. For the unfamiliar, Clear is a to-do app with a very minimal interface (an example to-do list is pictured). To a new user, it is not obvious at all how to get around the app, because instead of buttons and switches, you use a bunch of gestures to achieve things, which are explained upon first launching the app. Now, not all of these gestures are entirely intuitive, for instance, swiping downward to create a to-do is a bit confusing, but this app is attempting to change the way people think about UIs.

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I like to think of myself as a capable programmer, but as a designer I have a lot to learn. For instance, the making of this very site, while easy programmatically, took a very long time to complete because I couldn't figure out a pretty design for it. And so this follows with app development.

It was practically a year and a half ago that I started work on the app Cartographic, and let me tell you, I did not spend a majority of that time programming. In fact, not only did I get most of the work done in late 2011, I think I only made one or two commits in 2012 overall. What, then, is the problem? Am I simply lazy? No (at least, I hope not), the problem really lies in the fact that without a graphics designer, my project isn't going anywhere.

Cartographic is a good game (if I do say so myself), in that beta testers have responded well to it. It is playable and it is fun. However, the graphics are not only really quite awful, but also consist of sprites and backgrounds I borrowed from other games. Clearly this is not a shippable state of affairs. I wrote the entirety of Cartographic in a few months, but the fact that my app has to look good, coupled with the fact that I couldn't create pixel art if my life depended on it, is forcing this project to take a backseat to things that are more easily designable (like websites, which can be simple yet elegant, unlike iPhone games).

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