day 0.9 : ambadoo.app sneak peak
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
Now since we’ve bottled the app and shipped to Apple we know what it contains when , it’s time to get a sneak peak right? I’m tempted to uppercase this following text but I won’t. Bare in mind it’s a bare-bone skeleton we’ve shipped. More alpha than beta. It’s really just the fundamentals that got into this release. That said, the app does what at core what it’s supposed to do: keeping you up-to-date with contact information.
Let’s get to the point.
Contacts
A contact list, straight forward. With a twist. For now, the only difference you will see between the built in address book and ambadoo is the color, and the colored blobs. The blobs are your ambadoo friends, while the ones without is local contacts from your address book. You can delete a contact by just swipe, a duplicate for example.
Search
Built in at the top of your contact list is a search bar, where you can simply search people locally in your phone, or at the global ambadoo directory, then either contact them straight away or add them to your address book.
Do you notice the two Amb Adoos? Good. It’s a bug to fix for the next release =)
Profile
The heart of ambadoo is your profile, your card or whatever you want to call it. It’s you. It’s the only thing you really need to keep up-to-date. For this release we decided to include only the basics: phone numbers, emails & websites. You can add as few or many as you please, change as often as you want.
Privacy
You decide what you want to share with whom. For now it’s a switch between friends & everyone, where items set to friends only is visible to people you’ve accepted as ‘friends’. You get the point.
Sharing
Throw your business cards oldies, just start sharing your profile over WiFi or bluetooth and whoop, everyone around you can add you in a split sec. Enough said. Oh, by the way. Unlike the business cards, this function has no expiring date.
Invites
As someone add you to their address book, you can chose if you want them to see items only visible to friends. In that case you just click ‘Accept’ and they get instant access to your entire self-updating profile, or you can just ignore and they’ll see your public profile.
The (Complete) App
That’s it! And you wonder, what the heck took you so long?! Well, that’s for a different post! We can’t wait to let you try and use it. Still nothing from Steve. *waiting for review*
day -7: design & reality
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
As a designer, it’s easy to dream away with visions of the final beautiful product you’re about to launch. You have this, sometimes blurry, sometimes crisp clear image inside your head of a perfectly stitched together app.
Functionality is one thing. Clicking a button should return an action, pulling a door handle should open the door. Today we can take all that for granted. We expect things to work. What design does however is taking the experience to a whole different level. From being: Ok > Wow.
Design can make you angry if it’s done poorly, it’s pissing you off , or if done well it touches your emotions. It makes you happy, and sometimes you just hover that thing because it triggers something inside you, like when you find something hidden.
Design takes time, and a hell of an effort. From the very first idea of a concept to the very last pixel. A button can be way more than a button, and a table can be a table that you thought didn’t exist.
The original Tweetie for iPhone is a really good example of where design is built in to the core of the app. It’s so well done, it has set a whole new standard in app design. Things like the pull-to-reload we tend to think exist in all apps now, because it feels so natural.
We’ve been working parallel with the iPhone and web app for the past weeks and it’s becoming very clear that designing the two is very different. Designing for the web you pretty much only has to know .css (cascading style sheets) and can change things instantly, whereas with the iPhone you either have to hand over Photoshop/vector files to the developers or you have to know Objective-C (the programming language to code iPhone apps.
Finally reality hit us this week. There’s no way in heaven we can implement the design we’d really want and still make the deadline. What to do? Standard UI elements. Apple has a made a kit of elements to get the ‘iPhone App Feel’ that every developer can use, maybe since they know developers are not designers. But it kind of hurts in a designers soul to fall back on those components as they’re totally generic and soulless. But reality wins this time.
Right now it’s more important to actually get this baby out of the belly to show the world, than to fiddle with rounded corners and shades pleasing the designer soul. The designer (me) has to be reminded it’s still just a proof of concept we’re making.