High Order Blog

Notekeeper is the latest app from High Order Bit, and it just launched on the iPhone App Store. It’s a simple notepad for iPhone that supports photo and location attachments. It matches the iPhone’s built-in note-taking app in simplicity, but it makes noting your current location a snap. It also allows you to express your note in photos in addition to text. Because location attachment is automatic, and snapping a photo is a quick, low-concentration event, Notekeeper helps you take notes without even breaking stride.

And, after all, why shouldn’t you be able to use the full power of your phone for keeping reminders?

Here are some screenshots:

List of Notes

Notes Plotted on a Map

Creating a New Note

When might Notekeeper come in handy? We’ve been using it for a while now, and we come up with new uses all the time. Here are a few of my favorites:

Restaurant Reminders

I live in Chicago, a town known for it’s many great restaurants — so many great restaurants, in fact, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Every time I’m out, I find another restaurant I’d like to try.

Notekeeper is great in this situation. As a reminder, create a new note with your location, take a quick photo of the sign and jot down which night they have specials. Later, when you’re back in the neighborhood looking for dinner, pull out Notekeeper and view your notes on a map.

And it works well for other types of places, too: parks, stores, a nice spot on the beach…  The possibilities are endless.

Travel Journal

Notekeeper works great as a light and easy travel journal. Track the day’s events with locations and photos, and come back to attach your notes when you’re taking a coffee break. Later, your notes can help you flesh out a more polished journal that you can share with friends — or help you write photo captions.

There are all kinds of other ways we use Notekeeper from remembering parking spots, to marking waypoints on hikes. Notekeeper’s simplicity makes it extremely versatile.

Learn more on the Notekeeper website. Or, better yet, just download it for 2 bucks and check it out for yourself. We think you’ll love it as much as we do.

This post is a reaction to Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen’s essay on gestural interfaces, which I found quite interesting. (Speaking of Donald Norman, if you haven’t read his book, Design of Everyday Things, I highly recommend checking it out.) I appreciate the points made in the article, and would like to echo the argument, but I’d also like to place a significant caveat on some of the conlcusions.

The essay begins with a description of the state of gestural interfaces. I couldn’t agree with this more:

Nielsen put it this way: “The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.”

Word. As a developer who considers himself a relatively thoughtful interaction designer (albeit imperfect), it’s nice to hear usability experts call out these developers more concerned with graphics. I’ll go so far as to estimate that the vast majority of iPhone applications are poorly designed and amateurish. I find very few applications on the app store acceptable. (I have 42 apps installed, and many of those need to be removed.)

The essay goes on to discuss the lack of standards. On this point, again, I couldn’t agree more that the divergence in design is frustrating and to the detriment of usability. In the case of the iPhone, I blame developers for this trend. Apple has, for the record, outlined UI design guidelines, and I find that built-in iPhone apps are relatively consistent, which should serve as a guide for the rest of us.

I can see an argument for making apps stylish and fun, but doesn’t Apple do that without deviating from their core, familiar interactions?

The essay attributes gestural usability problems to a few reasons:

The lack of established guidelines for gestural control

The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.

The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.

Furthermore, the essay notes the fundamental principles of interaction design, which are: visibility, feedback, consistency, non-destructive operations, discoverability, scalability and reliability. The claim is made that “All these are rapidly disappearing from the toolkit of designers, aided, we must emphasize, by the weird design guidelines issued by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.”.

I’m not too familiar with the latest from Google and Microsoft, but this seems a little harsh in the case of Apple. I would argue that you can find examples of each of those principles thoughtfully considered in iOS. I’m sure there are exceptions, too, but given the ambition of what Apple has accomplished with gestural interfaces, it seems to me like they adequately considered these principles.

The essay continues:

We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.

Can someone confirm that Apple employs interaction design experts? I can’t imagine that their human interface guidelines are the collective whims of ignorant developers.

Sure, let’s develop some guidelines and improve gestural interfaces, but this is the caveat I’d like to add: I encourage Apple to keep doing what it’s doing. Once you consider the iPhone and iPad as engineering problems, I think Apple’s effort in usability is commendable. By ‘engineering problem’ I don’t mean to dismiss arguments regarding usability, but rather indicate that execution is hard and all products are imperfect.

A willingness to take risks and make mistakes is a critical part of innovation. Pre-release usability testing is important, but there’s always a tradeoff. More time perfecting the product increases development costs, which could increase the final price of the product. It also means the product is released later, and in the meantime, we wouldn’t even have an option of using gestural interfaces. The bottom line is that Apple is a company and not a standards or research body; usability is but one of many things they have to consider.

I also tend to believe that, all things equal, the more people involved in a project, the more difficult it becomes to be innovative. I bring this up because you could argue that Apple needs to employ more usability experts relative to engineers. While that might help devise better usability guidelines in theory, I am skeptical of its true value. More people means more communication overhead and politics, which can slow development iterations and dull thinking.

I look forward to the advances in gestural interfaces, but more so to the messy part done by Apple than the cleanup accomplished through research.

The first Chirpy feature update was released on the iPhone App Store today. Aside from a nasty crash-inducing bug, the initial launch went smoothly. We were pleased to receive a great deal of positive feedback. As is the case with all 1.0′s, however, there was definitely room for some improvement. We think this update addresses the most pressing deficiencies in 1.0. Here are the changes:

• Added a ‘find username’ button to the new message view (shows a batch of 100 friends)
• Added an automatic refresh when a push notification is received while the app is running
• Updated address book entries to include both the Chirpy url and the twitter.com user page
• Fixed bugs related to sending a message to a new recipient
• Fixed bug where ‘Add to Contacts’ button was enabled after adding a contact and restarting the app
• Fixed errant ‘dismiss’ button title that resulted after sending a new message
• Fixed some obvious landscape orientation bugs

We think it’s a nice little update, but you can expect that we won’t stop here. Enjoy!

Twitbit push notifications are fast. So fast that we find ourselves using direct messages over text messages with our Twitter pals. For those new to Twitter, direct messages are basically private tweets — short messages sent directly to people in your Twitter network. They work great as a substitute for text messages. With direct messages, you can save a couple bucks, benefit from internet ubiquity, and you don’t have to worry about sending messages to friends abroad. In addition to your mobile device, you can access your inbox through the web, email, or wherever else you use Twitter.

Until today, however, the experience has been suboptimal on the iPhone — yes, even with Twitbit. We appreciate the benefits of Twitter packaged into a single app, but with so much functionality in one app, there is no escaping certain usability compromises. It might just be the difference of an extra tap or two, or losing screen real-estate from the tab bar, but even the little things add up. We wanted to build an app to address these shortcomings.

Our newest release, Chirpy, is that app. Chirpy makes direct messages as intuitive, familiar and useful as text messages. With that goal as our focus, we made Chirpy’s interface very similar to the built-in messages app. Messages are organized as threaded conversations, not by inbox and outbox. New messages are composed right in-line, so you can reference the conversation as you type. Check it out:

Another critical aspect of any messenger app is fast notifications. We have a great deal of experience with Twitter notifications from Twitbit, but with Chirpy, we’ve made notifications even faster. We think we’re pretty close to making notifications instantaneous, and due to some exciting additions to Twitter’s API, notifications should only get faster.

Other Chirpy features include integration with your contact list, multiple Twitter accounts, landscape mode, photo attachments and alternative notification sounds. We also invested considerable time in making the app fast and polished.

Chirpy is available now on the iPhone App Store. And it’s only a couple bucks, so it should pay for itself in no time. Check it out and let us know what you think.