Design in Apps

Well designed products work they way you expect. As you use such products, it becomes clear that the designers thought about the concerns you might have and designed the product to address those concerns. —Ted Landau

Design is, I think, a very important element for things that involve the eyes. Well designed things are nice treats to the eye, just as candies are to the tongue. It’s always a pleasure for me to visit an art gallery and just admire the displayed statues or paintings. Or perhaps to a furniture store to window-shop the sofa and the shelves that makes me drool. They’re just begging to be taken home.

That applies to my digital life as well. I’m really a sucker for good-looking apps for both my Mac and my Android phone. Layman speaking, if a developer gives that much attention to design and puts effort into maintaining good design, then it can be inferred that the said developer does not only put forth making money and/or get fame out of his handiwork but also cares about it. That means we can trust the app for long-term use and get continuous support.

On the Mac, it isn’t really that hard to find those apps. Design is in Apple’s philosophy and app developers adapt that into their works too. Take Day One, for example. I bought this diary/journaling app back in March 2011 because I was needed an app of this kind that doesn’t bloat itself with too powerful features. I was sold by the screenshots only. I love its user interface: grey sidebar with self-explanatory icons for easy navigation, elegant writing environment with the date and time on top (and great choices of fonts, too), and an option to show an unobtrusive “Inspirational Messages”. It’s nice to see the reminder that pops up from the menu bar icon, too. Or maybe Reeder, an RSS reader app, which is just so good to look at. (I have just discovered an app called Wordsmith — The Next Generation Word Processor and it looks so, so good from the screenshots. It’s website is well-designed, too. I’m sure this app will go big in the future, at least for writers.) I often find myself opening the apps I mentioned just to admire the user interface because they’re so good to look at.

On Android, it’s not that easy to find such apps, although if you have the eye there are some nice ones as well. My recent findings include Writer, an app that offers extremely minimalistic interface for writing purposes; Any.DO, the sexy-looking to-do app that has a simple, neat-looking home-screen widget (although I use Do It Tomorrow for the purpose—not that I have much to do); Flipboard, the news aggregator app that has a magazine-like interface. The instant messaging app WhatsApp is worth noting too, as well as Dropbox and Evernote. (Apparently the ones I mentioned are all free apps.)

Like the paintings and statues in the art gallery or the sofa and the shelves in the furniture store, an app should look good so as to make people hear the begging of the app to be bought. If anything, people see before they touch and feel, right?

Weekend Project: DIY Vinyl MacBook Cover

I was inspired by this post about applying vinyl as MacBook covers and I decided to create my own version of it.

This was what my MacBook looked like prior to modification:

I found myself scratching a lot of the polycarbonate surface of the MacBook, particularly if I had something on my wrist, like a wristwatch (although I don't wear it anymore recently). Not only that, the said surface is also a real fingerprint magnet and I always find myself wiping it off every fifteen minutes or so. I thought that covering it with some kind of a protective layer would definitely be a good idea. I had considered purchasing Garskin, a decorative protective skin for MacBooks, but they cost more than Rp300,000 apiece—a price way beyond the reach of my shallow pockets! I was quite lucky to have stumbled upon the aforementioned blog post.

So I procured a one-meter square orange adhesive vinyl (locally known as polet motor or simply polet) from a street vendor for just about Rp15,000 (which is pricelessly cheap compared to Garskin), gathered the required tools (a box cutter and a ruler) and started the project.

Following the instructions from that blog, I adjusted the width and length of the vinyl with the keyboard side of the MacBook so that it would fit, and extended the size a few centimeters to make the application process later easier.

At this point, I felt that to cover the whole keyboard side was too risky, so I decided to cover the area around the trackpad, a.k.a. the palmrest, only, so with the box cutter, I cut off just the part of the vinyl that I needed and stored the rest for future use.

I took the back paper off of the vinyl and carefully applied the vinyl along the palmrest. Once it fit, I cut off the extended vinyls. This was the most difficult part, especially along the rounded edges and the trackpad: first, because it had to be recut many times to make it look neat; second, because I had to take extra caution not to damage my MacBook. However, with a little bit of a patience and also help of my box cutter and the ruler, I managed to get it done.

It took me about fifteen minutes… and here's what my MacBook looks like now:

It's not much, I know, but I'm quite satisfied with the new look of my MacBook. Not only had it added a little bit of style and personality to my MacBook, the method had also saved me from having to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a Garskin. The best part is the color orange which is really striking (because I love that color).

Now that I'm comfortable with the whole process, I'm planning on covering the area around the keyboard later as well, although I'd perhaps leave the screen part alone. We'll see how it goes.

p.s.
I wish I had documented the cutting-and-pasting process. But the instructions for it are very well covered in the blog that I linked in the beginning of the post. Next time I'll be sure to add pictures and more details in my future DIY projects though, if any.