Lean and clear: what makes iPhone apps good
If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, you’ve probably already downloaded an app or two (or twenty) from Apple’s App Store. And if you have, you’ve probably also developed a sense of which apps feel appropriate to the iPhone, and which apps don’t.
(By the way, Apple may have a naming problem—what do you call these apps? “iPhone apps” is an awkward fit for all those iPod touch owners.)
An excellent example of a good iPhone app is Joel Rosenberg’s Blocked—and by “good” I mean well-suited, rather than high-quality (though Mr. Rosenberg’s app is both). Blocked is a fun little game where you push blocks around the screen to free up a channel though which you then push a special block off the board through a gate. There are 100 levels grouped into sections which you unlock by completing the previous section, each level progressively more difficult.
The essential simplicity of the game itself is part of what makes it a good fit for the iPhone, but the game’s design and execution are also exemplary for their leanness and clarity:
- There’s not a lot onscreen: the blocks, two arrow buttons to move between levels, and three menu buttons at the bottom of the screen.
- Text is minimal.
- Completed levels and sections are stamped with a circled checkmark whose meaning is immediately clear and whose economy keeps the pages uncluttered.
- Arrow buttons allow you to move between levels for relatively modeless play.
- When you complete a level, you’re automatically taken to the next level. No need to say “take me to the next level”. Note that this is made possible by those arrow buttons, since if for some reason you didn’t want to go the next level automatically, you can go back easily enough.
- There are only three pages: Game, Levels, and Help.
Simplicity like this looks easy, but it’s actually pretty hard. The Levels page is simple in part because using those checkmarks to show completed levels and using button enabling to show unlocked levels makes it simple. It’s not hard to imagine an alternate design where still-locked levels might have been marked with a little lock icon, or text like “completed” might have been displayed to show completed levels. Both of these would have added weight to the page. Mr. Rosenberg’s decision to use the checkmark and the dimmed buttons instead kept the page light and rendered those details almost invisible.
Similarly, if the Help page seems simple it’s because the self-running animation shows you how to play, keeping the text minimal and the page uncluttered.
This attention to economy and clarity delights the player by making the app disappear. You pick up the game and just start playing, unaware of the care that went into creating that experience.
So when you wish your favorite iPhone app had another option or two, or had that feature that you say you can’t live without, consider that though you think you’d like the app a little more, you might actually use it a little less.
Although I agree that the app is nicely done, the concept itself is a direct copy of Nob Yoshigahara’s game “Rush Hour” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nob_Yoshigahara). I don’t know Mr. Rosenberg, but he might at least mention this somewhere. However, I am afraid that he will offend trademarks of the company Think Fun, who officially market this game.
A much better example of a nicely done game on the app store, but with an original concept, is Subway Shuffle. This game is actually a generalization of the Rush Hour concept, or, as developer Bob Hearn explains it:
“Imagine playing Rush Hour, but make all the cars 1×1 instead of 1×2 or 1×3. But still some can only move vertically, others horizontally. Replace the cars by tokens, red for horizontal, blue for vertical, and put the tokens on nodes of a graph with colored edges: red tokens can only move on red edges, blue on blue. If you use a grid graph, with horizontal edges red and vertical edges blue, then you have 1×1 Rush Hour. If you relax the grid graph constraint, and also allow more colors, then you get Subway Shuffle. These relaxations allow for lots of interesting possibilities in puzzle configuration. It’s also possible to have extremely complicated puzzles in a very small space: I’ve generated some puzzles on small graphs that require over 1,000 moves.”
best
michael
Hi,
Firstly, thanks John for the great review. I did spend a lot of time trying to make Blocked minimalistic enough to not have the mechanics get in the way of the core of the game, solving puzzles. It’s nice to have that recognized, I really appreciate it.
To Michael,
This is basically copied from the comment I left on your other post at tuaw.com, but I thought I’d show it here in the hope that it reaches you. I originally made “Blocked” because I’ve been enjoying all the incarnations of Rush Hour so much over the years; I’m a big fan of the game. Before I released it, I did my homework on the patents they had published. From the patent office website, they only patent their “Ornamental Design”, so I chose not to use cars or a car-like theme in order to stay away from their patents. I also avoided the use of their name in order to not violate their trademarks.
But most importantly, I think that the company *encourages* public reproductions of their game, as they link to many online incarnations from their official company site, and these versions make money through advertising ( http://www.puzzles.com/products/RushHour/RushHourLinks.htm ). You’re right, though, the original sliding block idea wasn’t mine, but I just wanted to take a shot at putting it on a platform that allowed me (and others) to play it on the go, like those others have been doing online.