Beauty Versus Function
Just a quick thought on where apps are and where they are headed. Everyone loves glossy looking apps. And one of the prettier things is the barrel style menu where you can flick through the columns to input information. It’s fun and pretty. But, it really is cumbersome. Think of the act of scrolling through the dollar amount of $73.86 as is shown in the picture. Using the barrel wheel you need to flick through four independent wheels. It’s really not efficient. If you opt for a keypad with ten digits (0-9) then you actually get a lot faster input. Of course, the penalty is that it looks a bit stock and boring even if it is better.
We’ve seen the iPhone swing the beauty pendulum as far as possible. At the same time, Windows Mobile has a history of swinging in the opposite direction and functionally there’s almost nothing that can’t be done on WM – you just need to dig into submenus and use a stylus to get there:) As 6.5 has been moving forward and we’re getting closer to WM7 I think WM will continue to get prettier and glossier apps. For my two cents, finger friendly is good, but given the choice between beauty and functionality I would take functionality. I want the power and speed even if it’s less of a show and I hope developers give me a powerful app that’s efficient and they can skip aesthetics that are just there for as a show piece . But that’s me – what do you guys want and which direction do you think developers should go? In other words, do you want something flashy to impress your friends or something powerful to show your boss? Remember, the same rules that apply to your apps would apply to your operating system and UI…
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Comments
jimski Yep, eye candy and gloss are always nice, but not at the cost of functionality. Some apps marry these two concepts pretty well, while others not so much. More important functions, like periodically updating an app (weather, news) without turning on my screen (battery killer) are much more important to me, but that’s a hard feature to display in a snazzy screenshot, so it becomes less important.
Unfortunately the trend (ala iPhone) is towards gloss, so I feel at times I am fighting a losing battle. The momemtum in the industry has lost touch with the thinking that these little computers are Personal Digital Assistants, so they are supposed to help us get through the day, and not just look nice. But maybe I am just to old to see the big picture.
Aside from some tweaks to improve performance and battery, I am generally happy with the way WM6.1 performs and WM6.5.X looks. I don’t expect OEM’s to ever develop killer apps, but 3P developers will continue to fill that void. So aside from increasing available processes, increasing processor speed and changing the memory structure (stuff under the hood), I don’t know what else I really need or want out of WM7. But if I lose functionality with this new OS, it will be time to stock up on old devices or rely on XDA to figure out how to flash older ROM’s into newer phones.
Peter Functionality over flash for me. Case in point – SPB Time 3.x uses these spinning wheels for their timers. Want a 10 minute countdown timer? Flick the wheel of numbers from 0 to 59 until you select 10. Miss by a bit, spin it backwards or forwards until you get the number you want. Does it look good? Yes. Does it function well? No.
I will say that the general look/feel of iPhone apps is nice and very good for most people. I’m glad that Apple put a lot of ability into their SDK to enable people to clone that. WM’s SDK doesn’t give people that ability easily and it frustrates developers.
To me the biggest useful gains have been the ability to use my device without a stylus for the most part. I rarely have to pull it out unless resetting or hitting a small area of the screen, which is increasingly rare.
“there’s almost nothing that can’t be done on WM – you just need to dig into submenus and use a stylus to get there”
Yeah and you also need that stylus to jam into the reset hole all the damn time.
I want both. How about a Blackberry mode setting. I also want much better batteries.
But seriously, I only mess with the new custom roms just to stay on top of the new frills because I like to tell people about it sometimes. There’s really been nominal improvement in my mobile experience for which the operating system improvements, not the screen resolution for instance, has been responsible since WM5. I still do the same stuff like RSS, planning and Google Maps. The most important improvements to me have been in Opera scrolling and rendering speed and Google Maps’s functionality but since I’ve outgrown installing software for the sole purpose of showing eye candy off to people on the subway, with exception to new significant improvements in Pocket Outlook of the 235** builds, there’s basically nothing I would miss if you sent me back a few years in Windows Mobile time. Just let me have Howard on Sirius, email (either activesync over ssl or imap-idle with a third party client), tasks, calendar, phone, RSS, an old beta of WMWifiRouter, mp3 and a decent web browser and I’m happy.
We here all like WM for being so almost open. But most consumers don’t even know what that means let alone know that it’s something they would prefer. They’d lose me as part of their mobile base but it’s a sacrifice worth their while so that they can clone the iPhone and along with it a drop of Apple’s success. That’s where they need to go. To make me happy though, they only need to let me do those things I described (while leaving things wide open to do XDA stuff to the phone) while streamlining everything else down to improve speed, stability, boot time and battery life. Like safe mode. We all know what safe mode is, at least us PC users.