Drawing inspiration from iOS apps

Café
#1

This thread from Mastodon caught my eye. It showcases a bunch of apps by independent developers for Apple’s platforms (click through to see the replies):

I appreciate that not everybody uses Apple or cares about them, but the independent development community for their platforms still makes an interesting case study. It prides itself on delivering a pleasant user experience with loving attention to detail, a sense of craftsmanship and a desire to get the best out of the platform. Perhaps a factor is that they are operating in a competitive commercial environment.

It struck me how many (perhaps the majority?) of these apps could be built with TiddlyWiki. For example:

  • Client and appointment tracking
  • Trivia quiz
  • Collect your vocabulary and learn new words using a slideshow
  • Keep track of money and objects you lend or borrow from friends or family
  • Habit tracking
  • Gamified to do list
  • Flashcards for learning a language
  • Tracking board game collections and play sessions
  • Score tracking for sports
  • Collection manager for Magic: The Gathering

I don’t mean to denigrate the accomplishments of these developers, but there are plenty of people in the TiddlyWiki community who could readily duplicate the core functionality of many of these apps.

However, these apps generally have a much higher standard of presentation, often with strong graphic design (albeit there is very little that couldn’t be done with HTML and CSS in TiddlyWiki). One of the factors is perhaps that the Apple platforms have very well established components and conventions for building user interfaces. It painfully reminds me that TiddlyWiki still doesn’t have enough higher level user interface components for users to easily replicate the contemporary web applications that will be familiar to our users.

Some of the tools in my personal TiddlyWikis are really very trivial. For example, I have a button that copies to the clipboard the skeleton of a .tid file with the modified and created fields filled in, and a grid of buttons that copy common terminal commands.

I think the common theme with these Apple apps is that there is surprisingly high value in trivial mini-apps that are focussed on a very narrow task with the simplest possible user interface, and the smallest possible number of clicks.

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#2

Good that you shared this, @jeremyruston, and I understand your reasons for doing so.

My take: Regarding the “much higher standard of presentation” – I don’t know that I want to code to a specific, recognised or even “standard” platform (notional or otherwise). Consider TiddlyTools: Eric has a very noticeable and obvious style which, for the most part, doesn’t sit well with my design choices (though the tools themselves are generally superb). And for me, personally, I enjoy the freedom of experimentation (that TW gives me), simply trying different things to see how they look.

I worry, therefore, that there may be a division around stylistic choices (CSS). Even if we had an agreed “standard” to which every dev adhered, the resultant component may not be something a given consumer/user might choose (not without tackling the potentially large number of CSS changes required).

Maybe I’m over thinking it…

Putting all that to one side (its baggage laden, for sure), the project itself would certainly benefit from a set of off-the-shelf components or otherwise composable parts. New users most definitely would appreciate them, as would many others, I’m sure.

Meta: not sure this belongs in Cafe. Why not Developers?

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#3

One thing that resonates with me here is discussing what TiddlyWiki “is” and can be.

Ive mentioned this before elsewhere, but I’ve long considered TiddlyWiki more of a personal app maker than a note taking application, and the tooling, I think, supports that (styling notwithstanding).

I hope that refining its identity is part of ongoing discussion with the core team as it will steer everything from the home page, to tradeoff decisions in future versions. I think labeling as just a note taking tool sells it short!

I think the tagline recently introduced (Make something of your notes) is a nod to that direction, and I hope there’s continued push into that direction.

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#4

I don’t think that would be the intention. In the case of iOS apps, many developers differentiate their apps by using customised components or departing from the standards. The point of having established standards is to speed things up by having a baseline from which people can develop their own customisations.

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#5

@jeremyruston , I sort of agree with your sentiments re interface look and feel. However, if @stobot iscorrect and TW is aimed at the personal tool, then no additional work is needed on look and feel. Developers will create what suits them.

If, however, the aim of TW is to move it into a multi-user on-line tool, then I think work is needed on look and feel and having a ‘standard’ look that includes most of the common elements of web based interfaces, is sorely needed. Yes, I know you can do it using vanilla CSS, HTML and Javascript, but if pre-compiled elements were available then that would make development more focussed on my content and functionality rather than the basics of interface elements. That is why IDE’s were developed in the first place, focus on the higher level stuff and leave the basic to someone else. I still remember coding screen layout in COBOL before window layout tools became available - boring, boring, boring!

I would love to have TW integrated into something like Xojo (http://xojo.com), maybe generating a TW file out of the back end. It would seem to me that Xojo already has many analogues of TW basics as well as a simple interface layout tool.

bobj

#6

Before we discuss how to make the dishes appetizing at the restaurant, it would make sense to ensure that the locale itself works properly. The most valuable thing to bring functionality to end users is not individual apps but the app store where individual apps can live and compete. Such availability and competition is what drives quality. For TW, if users cannot easily discover+install the apps, then there’s very limited use for “higher level user interface components”…

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