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SwimTimer Appan exercise in UI-design
“Bay Area Mobile” Meetup - Hacker Dojo - Thu Jul 7, 2011Frank Siebenlist
Monday, July 11, 2011
What?
• SwimTimer App Demo
• High-level App Implementation Features
• Conclusions
Monday, July 11, 2011
Get your stopwatch-apps out
and get ready... set... go...
Monday, July 11, 2011
SwimTimer Demo - Example Screens
Monday, July 11, 2011
Standard iPhone Stopwatch App
Monday, July 11, 2011
What’s wrong with “other” timer apps?
• Buttons are too small
• easy to press outside of button
• More than one button
• easy to press the wrong button
• Mistakes are made
• unforgiven - too bad...
• No saving or sharing of results
• reset is forget
Monday, July 11, 2011
What’s right with “this” SwimTimer app?
• One huge button
• impossible to miss - pay attention to race
• One single button for start/lap/finish
• impossible to press the wrong button
• Manage timed entries when you have the time
• during/after race - no hurries... relax
• Timed entries can be discarded
• with a swipe - does the right thing
• Tweet/email results
• uses internet memory
Monday, July 11, 2011
SwimTimer App• Much improved stopwatch-app
• unique features among dozens of “similar” apps
• Tested by real swim-coaches and timer-challenged parents
• close to feature freeze
• Started out as just an exercise in UI-widget use
• became an exercise in UI-design
• About 2 dozen beta-testers
• maybe... probably... app will get published... soon(which was never the original intention)
Monday, July 11, 2011
SwimTimer AppImplementation
• Toolkit/Language: ANSCA’s Corona/Lua
• Why?
• Contemplating to use Corona for real-world apps
• Corona’s ui.lua was far too “primitive”
• See if we could improve...
• Not much left of original ui.lua...
Monday, July 11, 2011
Implementation Features (1)
• Description of ui-elements fully declarative
• Objects and Handlers referred to by name
• Geometry managers to dynamically align groups of objects
• Object display properties, groups, alignment, handlers... all (optionally)described in json-files
• Object cloning and persistence (almost) for free
Monday, July 11, 2011
Implementation Features (2)
• Button defined by image, rectangles, or any instantiated display object or sprite
• All event-driven - propagate thru standard Corona event registration/handling mechanism
• Listview enhanced with geometry manager
• Swipe left/right for duplicate/delete
• Easily configure button-state in xor/and-groups
• Much easier to keep app modular and MVC-like
Monday, July 11, 2011
Corona UI Futures (?)• ANSCA working on new extended widget support
• widget.lua (beta - work in progress)
• still “primitive” in many ways... as far as visible (source unavailable so far)
• Waiting to see if my “enhancements” would be easily portable to new library
• if not too much work... will port relevant parts as open-source
• Corona is a great game development toolkit...
• ...but basic ui-widget support is lagging behind substantially compared to other SDKs (LiveCode, IOS, Appcelerator, ...)
• This SwimTimer app shows what you “could” do with Corona for a UI... not necessarily what you “can” do out-of-the-box...
Monday, July 11, 2011
Post-Mortum...• The day after this presentation, ANSCA communicated that Corona’s widget/coronaui-
library will NOT be open-source after all...
• change of previous promises... too bad... guess they have their reasons...
• Consequences
• Impossible to port my UI-extension to Corona’s widget-library
• Makes no sense to publish my UI-extension as open-source
• Corona’s widget-library: non-declarative, no json-config, no named-objects/handlers, no geometry-groups&mgr, no swipes, no object persistence, no MVC modularity, ... so 1980’s ;-) ... ANSCA’s loss ...Corona’s community’s loss
• Corona good for physics-games as a box2d-shim... but rather primitive for business apps
• In process to re-render SwimTimer App on LiveCode (RunRev.com)
• ...as well as to use LiveCode for our “real” business apps (personalized medicine)
• No need to write any UI-extensions, true IDE with GUI-designer, HyperCard on steroids, real debugger, plus easy call-outs to native IOS: LiveCode is a very impressive environment!!! (...and it’s difficult to impress me anymore...)
• Maybe next meeting I should give a presentation about my LiveCode experience (...and compare it to Corona...)
Monday, July 11, 2011
Thanks!??? Questions/Comments/Suggestions ????
Ability to create innovative apps for on-the-go and on-the-couch.
Monday, July 11, 2011
