“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.