bgror

Ekawada: Approved for Sale! »

Created at: 23.11.2010 16:46, source: the { buckblogs :here } - Home, tagged: Announcements Projects ekawada ios string figures

Last night I received a long-awaited email: Ekawada is finally approved for sale in the App Store!

It’s been a pretty wild ride, from start to finish. The first commit was made on May 25, but I’d been tinkering on it for at least a month before that, learning Objective-C and Cocoa and basically trying to prove to myself that this was something I could actually build. The app was submitted to the App Store on November 3rd, rejected (due to a bug in Ekawada) on the 11th, resubmitted, and finally accepted just last night. And here I am, almost 6 months since that initial commit, offering my creation to the world.

Really exhilarating. Even if no one else likes what I’ve built, I’ve learned a lot, and since I built the app primarily for myself, there will always be at least one passionate user!

So, the sales pitch: if you have an iOS device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) with at least iOS 3.0, head on over to the App Store and download Ekawada. It’s free, comes with eight figures for you to learn, and includes nine tutorials to help you along. And if you happen to like what you see, there are almost 100 more figures (in 5 packs) available for purchase in-app, $0.99 per pack.

And let me know what you think, either with ratings and reviews in the App Store, comments here, notes on Twitter, or even just an old-fashioned email.

Thanks!

Design Forces in Ekawada, Part 5 »

Created at: 09.11.2010 20:37, source: the { buckblogs :here } - Home, tagged: Projects Under the Hood design ekawada forces ios string figures

In making Ekawada a free app, one of my hopes is that people with little or no experience with string figures might be tempted to download it and give it a try. But a list of string figures and some cryptic instructions are not going to be particularly encouraging to these newcomers; I needed to make sure that Ekawada was suitably welcoming to them, without getting in the way of more experienced users.

The three screenshots below illustrate the approach I took:

The first screenshot is the home screen, which is the first thing a user will see when they open Ekawada. It includes a limited set of options, and the very first one the user will see is labeled “New to string figures?”. If they tap that option, they’ll be shown the second of these three screenshots: the tutorial list.

Ekawada will ship with 9 tutorials initially. These range from selecting your first string, to basic string maneuvers like the Navaho and loop exchanges. These tutorials are intended for rank beginners, and are focused on teaching things like how to read the notation used in the instructions. The tutorials also include links to some of the included figures, to encourage people to apply what they’ve learned.

If, however, you’re not a complete neophyte, you might not identify as “new to string figures”, but you may still have questions about Ekawada itself. If so, the second option in the list is intended to attract your attention: “Got a question?” Tapping on that option will take you to the third screenshot: “Common Questions”.

There aren’t a lot of questions here right now: just six things that I expect people might want to know. As I get feedback from people using Ekawada “in the wild”, I’ll grow that list.

I’m sure that as the app gets used, deficiencies in my approach here will surface. In the end, the best anyone can do is guess until the app gets put in front of real people, but I’ve tried to anticipate some of the common concerns.

Ekawada is currently “in review”, according to iTunes Connect, and has been since Monday morning. I’ll post as soon as I have more news. You can bet I’m refreshing iTunes Connect some few times per day!

I’ll be heading to New Orleans tomorrow for RubyConf, but if I’ve got some time while I’m there, I’ll try and do another post this week focusing on the Ekawada store, and the process I went through deciding how to organize the initial offering of figure sets.

Ekawada: Submitted! »

Created at: 04.11.2010 16:30, source: the { buckblogs :here } - Home, tagged: Announcements Projects ekawada ios string figures

Last night I finished the marketing site for Ekawada (at least, the first draft of it), plugged the last of the memory leaks reported by the Instruments tool, created some app icons that I finally felt did the app justice, and…and… YES! I submitted Ekawada to the App Store!

I’ve been told that the review process for new submissions is currently taking a little more than a week, so with a bit of luck Ekawada could be available for download sometime late next week.

I’m giddy!

Design Forces in Ekawada, Part 4 »

Created at: 03.11.2010 16:17, source: the { buckblogs :here } - Home, tagged: Projects Under the Hood design ekawada forces ios string figures

For many people, string figures are games that they learned as children, and haven’t touched since. The years are rarely kind to memory, so what this means is there are a lot of people who remember doing figures, but can’t remember what they were called, or how they were done.

I knew, back in April, that Ekawada needed to address this somehow.

The solution I came up with is based on filtering figures by their attributes. For example, suppose you remember, way back when, doing a figure that had a bunch of diamond shapes in it. You don’t remember what it was called, or how it went, just vaguely what it looked like.

You’d go to Ekawada’s index list, and tap the magnifying glass icon, which would take you to the filter criteria selection page (pictured on right). From here you could drill down further into the specific criteria you want to filter on.

In our case, we’d choose “appearance” (since we only remember that the figure looked like diamond shapes), which would take us to the list of appearance criteria.

(Note that with an initial set of only eight figures, most people won’t see much to select here. Then again, they wouldn’t really need to use the filters, either, since eight figures are trivial to scan. But with the other 98 figures installed from the five available packs, the available filter criteria are pretty extensive.)

There’s “diamond”. We’d select it (and any other criteria we want to filter on), and return to the index view.

The resulting list is still longish (diamonds are a very common theme in string figures), but it’s much better than trying to scan all 100+ rows.

Now, I’m not 100% pleased with this filtering system. It’s functional, but the flow isn’t quite right. I intend to revisit this in later versions, possibly ripping out the current incarnation and replacing it with something more flexible. I’d like to add the ability to search by name, for one thing, as well as the ability to combine filters together. (Currently, selecting more than one filter returns all figures that match any of them: an “or” condition, rather than an “and”.)

In spite of that, the system works as it is and it does let you answer the question, “what was that figure I used to know?”

Ekawada itself is nearly done; I’m wondering if I could possibly have it available to download by RubyConf, though the bottleneck is going to be the App-Store review process. I also still need to flesh out the website and help pages (and a few other marketing-related things), but I’m almost there! It feels like I’ve run a marathon.

I’ll do a few more posts before Ekawada launches; the next one will talk about how Ekawada answers the question: “I’m new to all this—where do I start?”

Design Forces in Ekawada, Part 3 »

Created at: 01.11.2010 16:41, source: the { buckblogs :here } - Home, tagged: Projects Under the Hood design ekawada forces ios string figures

String figure books are great resources, but they can be incredibly frustrating, too. Even if you’ve never tried to use one, it’s not hard to imagine having a string looped around your fingers, trying to hold the book open with your knee, and then discovering that the next step wraps onto the next page. You somehow need to turn the page without dropping any strings, and without closing or dropping the book.

It is no surprise, then, that this became one of the design forces that drove Ekawada’s construction.

Now, given the constraints on the size of an iPhone screen, it isn’t feasible (in general) to display all of the steps for a figure in one screen, so there still needs to be some kind of “next page” operation. However, the touchscreen makes this much easier to do than with a physical book.

This screenshot shows the “figure detail” view. It gives you a nice big picture of what the final pattern will be, and then a sequential list of the steps to accomplish it. As you can see, the number of steps for “Osage Diamonds” (a.k.a. “Jacob’s Ladder”) exceeds the available screen real-estate, and so bleeds off the bottom. But that’s no problem on an iOS device, because you can simply swipe to scroll, and a swipe is much easier to do with strings on your fingers than trying to turn the page of a physical book.

Further, if you tap any row in the instructions, you’ll be taken to a “zoomed” view. Here, each instruction is displayed full-screen, including any illustration or clarification for that step. (Not all steps have illustrations or clarifications, but for those that do, you’ll find them in this view.) You’ll also get an indicator of how much further you have to go to the end of the figure, and icons for going to the next (or previous) step.

Why icons? I considered doing a “swipe” gesture to go to the next page, but really, a tap is easier to do with strings on your hands than a swipe. (The less motion involved, the better.) I tried to strike a balance between size of the icons (a larger target is easier to hit) and maximizing the viewable area for the step (the less often you have to swipe to scroll a step instruction, the better). The size as it is now seemed best, empirically, but later versions may adjust the balance further.

This zoomed view also answers another one of the design forces behind Ekawada: “I don’t understand what this step is telling me to do.” You don’t want to just add verbosity to the instructions, because more verbosity can actually hurt readabilty. (Just try reading these instructions for the “Apache Door” figure, if you want a concrete example of what I mean.)

Thus, for steps where the instruction itself may be too terse, or ambiguous, I can use the zoomed view to add an illustration, or extra clarification, without bloating the instruction list. When you need more information, you can get at it easily, but for the common case, you can just scan the instruction list.

Tune in next time, when I’ll address another design force behind Ekawada: “I remember learning this one figure as a kid, but can’t remember how to do it now.”