Not actually having an iPhone yet to test on makes it rather difficult to develop an application for it. However, we persevere. It helps to have iPhoney to test on, because you get an idea of how many pixels you have to work with. And watching the videos on Apple’s site, you get a pretty good idea of how small the screen is, and how big your fingers seem.
So we’ve tried to make the interface obvious, and finger-tap targets large. Our application is for tracking vehicle mileage on your iPhone, and here is what one of its screens looks like:
We were sure to keep the buttons large. Also, in this example, you choose between several “drivers” of your vehicle. Rather than list them out as choices, with radio buttons, we made one big button that switches from one driver to the next. It’s not quite as obvious what it does, but you figure it out quickly, and it doesn’t matter how many drivers you have – they always take up the same space. Simple and elegant.
As much as possible, we’re trying to get it to look and work like a real iPhone application. We suspect that once you get used to an iPhone, using it will be second nature, and our applications should attempt to blend right in with that nature.
We’ll see tonight!
