Notices

I think juise- has some good points. The people who program for capacitive screens have to be much more concerned about the user's intent. Apple has done an excellent job here (no pun intended). Rarely does my iPod touch respond, or not respond, unpredictabley. But on my n900 for instance, when I'm scrolling through lists, even though it doesn't activate, the row I put the stylus on will temporarily highlight as if it means to activate. That's lazyness, and it gives my eyeballs and thus my brain a quick jolt of fear that it is going to activate. Uncool.

See I read you here - about creating a mobile website - but sadly "mobile websites" means iPhone based websites these days and they only work on browsers which have the iPhone header in it.

Also sometimes even on a normal mobile website the design such. Like for my Bank of America website (normal mobile site - not the iPhone site) - the button is so close to another link you invariably hit the link when trying to click the biutton ... and there are at least 4 screens to go thru before you get to the accounts page ... poor design.

But then of course if the same company designs an app - maybe that will be pooorly designed too.

What is ideal for say my train company to implement is provide the data via an API or something - or XML so that even 3rd party developers can write apps for such sites. Cause its is not always feasible to ask each company to design a mobile applivcation for each device.

For a thread about UI and pretty apps, the dense text/images ratio here is really high.

I suspect most devs would welcome help from a designer. It seems that there are a lot more coders with a FOSS mindset than artists; big open source projects are so frequently fugly yet functional...

Actually I think it was a very good comparison. One clearly had a better usage of the desktop space than the other. Both seems to be graphically "pretty" but one is using the screen far more efficiently.

Yes, we have a good clock on Maemo too, so the thread starter would probably use the one you linked to, if only he knew about it. But that would have made a comparison pointless, since they're much the same and he wanted to display difference between an appealing application and one that doesn't appeal to him.

As to which one is prettier, that is a matter of preference. Sadly, I think the enemy one is cleaner. But doesn't N900 the flip clock have skinning?

Yeah, that guy just disappeared. Too bad, he was really good, and his Italian-to-English was hilarious.

Engineer graphics that's what you're seeing.
Companies hire UI designers to design the UI and graphics desingers to draw the UI.
Homebrew app doesnt' have this luxury and budget.

But why do nearly all iPhone apps look good? Are all those 100000 apps made by software companies?

Surely not, but I expect a lot of those 100000 apps look pretty bad too. Most of the good looking iPhone apps are probably made by professionals.

It really depends. Plenty of them use the standard UI with custom icons. Others don't use any of the iPhone OS UI. Do you have an iPhone OS device? If so, download the NASA app. Very generic, but it looks decent because the default widget set looks decent, and acts decently. But compared to many other apps in the repository, it could be argued that it's ugly.

As far as I know, all versions of Maemo support GTK theming and custom app icons. What all versions of Maemo don't support, is OpenGL ES. That's the finishing touch for all the eye candy, but Maemo 5 uses it differently than iPhone OS, and I don't think it's themeable. If it were, you might see more of what you're looking for. At the moment, too much is left to the developer, and that's good and bad. But the default Maemo 5 UI could certainly be blingier.

But my opinion is that Apple wasn't, isn't and won't be going for bling any time soon. Ever. They have one goal in mind: Make sure the user is confident that things are happening as expected at all times. There's rarely a WTF moment. They use transparency and animated transitions to help maintain user confidence and to lessen frustration. The UI isn't moving at machine speed, it's moving at human speed. It makes things easier and less intimidating.

That said, there are those of us that aren't intimidated by technology and thus are more immune to UI prettiness. We're not the norm, but you knew that.

I saw the post saying there's no iPhone apps with ugly interface and I thought I'd google a bit to disprove that.... surprisingly, I couldn't find any articles talking about any specific iPhone apps with ugly interface (!).

Instead, I've found this listing of 30 iPhone apps w/ 'sexy' interfaces:

http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/iph...xy-interfaces/

I thought some of them are quite interesting and relevant to this thread.