I would be remiss if I did not mention that Tallymander has passed Apple’s scrutiny and made it into the App Store. Visit tallymander.com for the official minisite or check out the iTunes Store Page.
Screenshots:
Tallymander: The original use case
Tally parameters
A childhood obsession with bar LEDs manifests itself in almost every UI I've made for the last four years.
After spending the first few years of my career slaving six hours a month on laundry and ironing, I did a cost/benefit analysis and decided that dry cleaning is a better deal. The only chores involved with dry cleaning are gathering your clothes, counting your articles and driving them to the shop.
The business of counting always sucks for me — I get distracted and lose count. Pen and paper are out of the question for this task, since I need at least one hand free. I figured that someone had already solved my problem in the App Store. I was right:
My competition
For $6.99, that lovely application could be mine.
Hell no.
Naturally, this meant I was going to have to write my own. I took on the challenge of solving the tally problem in the most flexible, effective way possible. I wasn’t going to write just a tallying application. I was going to write the killer tally app.
Tallymander is a UITableView-based tally manager. You can count up, you can count down. You can count as many different things as you like. You don’t even have to touch the screen: entries can be set up to respond to a firm shake of your iPhone. You can use it to count things, to keep score, whatever. It has swipe-delete. My favorite feature: you can email a report containing all of your tally data.
The interface was inspired by the alarm tab of the Clock app, which I love. Clock is a perfect example of how UITableView is the most badass interface scaffold ever.
I submitted Tallymander for App Store review tonight. It’s a good palette cleanser, having just shipped Oddage. I don’t want to turn into casual iPhone game programming guy. It’s also a fun experiment in usability, trying to balance power and flexibility with fun and ease of use.
Is it the killer iPhone tally app? We’ll see how it goes.
Dear BofA:
I know you have a lot on your mind lately, what with your bank purchases and the whole of the finance industry falling apart. Still, I’d like to inspire your engineers to embark upon a simple, fun skunkworks project.
You may remember cashing in the iPhone App Store craze with your free BofA app this summer. You did promise to make it less ugly. You haven’t followed through yet.
Now, we’re all busy and I sympathize. Making a nice app is hard. So I did the hard part and designed a UI for you. It’s a gift. Repay me by implementing it and sparing us all the hideous orgy of Times New Roman that is your existing iPhone UI.
Remember, I’ve done the heavy lifting. This isn’t hard. You don’t even need to do it in Cocoa. You can keep using the WebKit display your app currently uses and implement my design in John Gruber’s “shit sandwich.”
Now, the existing home screen is okay.
It’s when we actually want to get down to some banking that things go downhill:
Wow. That’s a lot of Times. Ugly, small, hard to read. Fix it like this:
Next, let’s get logged in:
Blegh. Let’s get a tab bar going. Not just because tab bars are handy, which they are, but because making the user tap an area as tiny as those menu links is just cruel to iPhone users:
There we are. The tab buttons are much easier to strike with a fingertip — less time wasted by hitting the wrong selection. We’ll start the user at the accounts breakdown, since your balance is almost always the info you want first. Next, let’s check out account detail:
Painful. Let’s better group the transaction information and use some visual cues to explain individual entries:
Not so hard. You already use those icons for desktop online banking. Now let’s transfer funds:
Making the user step through multiple screens for a single task sucks, especially in 2008. Let’s streamline this:
Better! The user doesn’t lose track of what’s going on.
Nothing crazy, here, just some simple suggestions based on existing iPhone UI conventions. I hope this helps you guys.
I built these mockups using the excellent iPhone UI PSD file. The payroll information above is speculative. I do not work for Apple. Yet.
