“The killer app for the iPhone/iPod touch is the App Store. 85,000+ apps have been written and, via the App Store, 2 billion copies of those apps have been downloaded. Apple gets 30% of the revenue; the developers, 70%. Everyone has been making a lot of money,” Bruce Tognazzini writes for AskTog.
“That gold rush is about to be over,” Tog writes.
“Apple, by all appearance, designs its hardware and software for a single user—Steve Jobs. This is, in many ways, an excellent idea. Steve has always been and continues to be fanatical about design, usability, and salability. It was a successful formula for the creation of the Mac, and it continues to be a successful formula,” Tog writes.
“The only problem is, there are other people in the world who are not like Steve. For example, there are people that not only examine a product from every possible angle, but actually use it. A lot. Some of us have thousands of songs. Some of us have tens of thousands of photographs. Some of us have hundreds of apps,” Tog writes.
“We are drowning,” Tog writes.
Tog writes, “In this article, I want to present a simple solution to Springboard’s [the formal name of the iPhone/iPod touch home screen] current limitations, limitations that are about to plateau app sales, costing both Apple and its developers billions of dollars.”
In his full article Tog covers:
• What’s wrong with today’s Springboard 1.0?
• A New Springboard 2.0 Design
• Springboard Improvements:
– Page Labels
– Vertical Scroll
– User-Controlled Icon Positioning
– Containers
– Aliases/Shortcuts
Tog writes, “All of these changes work within the current Springboard metaphor and should not present any insurmountable programming challenges. Certainly vertical scroll is most critical and should be implemented within the next couple of months if sales are not to be further limited. The rest can follow.”
Full article here.
He should just develop it, or have it developed, and release it on Cydia.
“salability” ?
I use catagories which is available in cydia to organize my hundreds of apps. Apple should make something like this where people can then organize all their apps and make sense of what they have purchased over the months of using their device.
Here! Here! I support this idea wholeheartedly!
As if Tog didn’t know Apple is, this very minute, working on such things.
Can you say 4.0?
What is he trying to accomplish with vertical scrolling? I can think of a few things that might be an option, but what exactly is he wanting to happen here?
“There are lots more apps I would like to buy … no longer even consider them because there’s nowhere to put them …”
True.
I only place 12 apps per screen. I like to keep the bottom row open on every screen as it looks less distracting and is much easier to move apps from one screen to the other.
When I see a new app that I like, I have to ask myself which app I am going to delete to make room for the new one.
i love cydia categories. really, who needs 12 screens of icons!
I wish you could password protect one chosen screen with your banking, passwords, shopping, or anything you want to keep even more private than a per app password.
Tog’s one of the Founding Fathers of the Mac UI, so his thoughts carry alot of weight. He gave us the pinch multitouch gesture.
I think the first three recommendations are excellent.
@AmericanJoe
Vertical scrolling allows you to have varying amount of apps for each “Tab”, where a tab is a springboard page with a title as in his example. (Although he didn’t use the word tab)
The reason is that he wants to have more than 16 apps on some tabs but not on others.
For example, one tab might just be web links to all the blogs he enjoys reading. There might be more than 16 of those. Maybe you want to have all of your games under one tab.
Personally, I thought they were all great ideas, although implementing the titles on the pages is going to be a little harder than depicted because of the fact that your finger covers most of it. That will take some design work
I was coming to suggest Cydia’s methods but I see most have already touched on it.
Apple is woefully behind when it comes to iPhone app management. We’re just now able to manage apps in iTunes. WTF, that should’ve been there right off the bat. It seems like they’re always one step behind these days rather than being ahead of the curve. I mean you brag about all the apps that get downloaded, don’t you think maybe big buttons on a screen may no longer be the easiest way to navigate your interface?
Of course 4.0 will bring changes but jeez, that’s damn near a year away in June 2010. Apple should’ve been on top of this with 3.0. Why does Palm, with probably a quarter of the employees at Cupertino, continually update webOS with features that Apple would take a year or more to add? Why did it take two friggin years to get copy & paste and a landscape view for e-mail? It’s crazy how slow they can be.
Getting it right is more important than doing it fast. Apple may take their time, but they do keep on making it better. Though I understand the need for increased function… I guess I am simply willing to be a bit more patient.
Great ideas all of them and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple implemented something along these lines eventually, however, remember what happened with cut and paste on the iPhone? Someone came up with a few ideas after many iPhone users moaned about not having cut and paste and Apple took note but then did it their own way.
What I think Tog will achieve with this is to help cement the need for some of these things. if he offered it to SJ without broadcasting it to the whole world then maybe it would go in to iPhone 3.5 or 4.0 as-is but, now we’ve all seen this where would be the surprise in that?
Still, if it get’s them thinking at Cupertino it’s not a bad thing at all.
Ya already have User-Controlled Icon Positioning.
It’s called iTunes 9.
@thirdshoe,
Tog meant placing an icon anywhere we want on a Springboard page, even if it meant spaces between them, to create unique page views rather than forcing them into their current alignment. Read the article to see a picture of what he means.
I was finally able to read the whole article and he’s right on point. I thought this might be some next level stuff but these are some of the simplest, most evolutionary improvements that should’ve been added with 3.0 at the latest. When you look at it, it’s shocking how Apple has failed to make these upgrades. It’s small potatoes but it’d make a big difference in how I interact with my iPhone.
I only have about 30 apps at a time on here, versus the 100+ I downloaded and keep stored in iTunes, because I find it annoying to deal with any more. But this would go a long way and for Apple to be sitting on their asses in regards to the iPhone OS is a travesty.
I maxed out the number of apps you can display on the iPhone my first week I got it. 🙁
Tog is a douche. He has been riding that Apple job for frigging decades now, and basically just uses it to hawk Nielsen / Norman Group propaganda.
This guy forgot his iPhone history. Recall that when the iPhone first came out, Apple was only supporting Web 2.0 apps.
Apple quickly realized that true apps would make the iPhone a killer item, and thus the App Store was created. Apple was quickly overwhelmed with the number of app developers, as evidenced by the delays in approving apps.
Apple has updated iPhone 3.0 to handle many, many apps. So 4.0 will be the next stage of evolution.
Plus Apple has stock prices to worry about. Major releases with measurable increases in performance and design only help stock prices.
I usually like Tog’s stuff, but I think he is wrong here. Making the springboard scroll both vertically _and_ horizontally would make it much harder to search through all the apps to find one.
Anyone with 180 apps is a pack rat! Machines can help you organize, but the user will always have to provide the discipline to make it happen. With that many apps, you’d never remember that the oddball situation you find yourself in could be solved by something you bought a year ago and hadn’t touched since. (Would such an app still work?) It would be faster to find a new solution on the App store.
Personally, I have 50 apps, (excluding the Apple standard ones.) and keep 35 on my iPod.
I would suggest that Tog just clean house and keep the extra apps on his laptop. (Which I know he takes with him.)
We need a KID MODE where your friends’ kids (or your kids) want to play with your iPhone.
(Ya, like click email and swipe delete, swipe delete, etc…)
Couldn’t agree more here. Apple needs to be more on top of these obvious shortcomings, especially for power users. I mean howbhard can it be to hove us a list of apps that can be easily scrolled? Common
I have given up on organizing apps beyond the 3rd screen.
Tog is talking lipstick.
I want to pinch and stretch the screen to enlarge or shrink text, while locking down margins!
It’s a no-brainer for those of us who love the written word.
As it is now, reading MDN articles in their current form is okay, but its not great because stretching the screen only magnifies the screen and the reading experience is lost, unless you don’t mind the constant scrolling.
Multi-touch should handle text and images differently. Zooming in is great for detailed inspections of images, but it would be remarkable if I could stretch the screen and enlarge the font’s size.
I want fill the screen with a single letter if I so choose, but could double-tap and revert to its native resolution.