Vincent Gable’s Blog

January 15, 2010

EULA Today Fail

Filed under: Announcement,iPhone | , , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on January 15, 2010

The EULA1 for the USA TODAY iPhone App starts off

General

These Terms of Service govern your use of the USATODAY.com website (the “Site”) only and do not govern your use of other USA TODAY services, such as services offered by the USA TODAY print newspaper.

Clearly this invalidates the agreement on the iPhone, since the iPhone App is not “the USATODAY.com website”.

This is mildly embarrassing for USA TODAY, and even more of a fumble for Mercury Intermedia, who built the app. But I can’t think of any way this actually hurts anyone, even in theory. Users are already bound by the App Store Terms and Conditions, so why bother putting your own EULA (that nobody’s ever going to read much less care about) in your app?

1To see the EULA, tap that little i near the bottom left of the homescreen, then tap Terms of Service. The text above was copied from version 1.5 of the USA TODAY iPhone App.

January 13, 2010

Splash Screens Are Evil

Filed under: Design,iPhone,Programming,Usability | ,
― Vincent Gable on January 13, 2010

Splash screens are evil. While branding is important, the proper place for it is in the iconography, optional “About” or “Info” screens, and App Store profiles. The most common interaction pattern with iPhone applications is to launch them frequently, close them quickly, and treat them as part of a set of tools that interact to comprise a single user experience. Splash screens break the perception of seamlessness.

The HIG offers a very useful suggestion for managing launch states, which may be quite slow, depending on the needs of your application. The suggestion is to provide a PNG image file in your application bundle that acts as a visual stand-in for the initial screen of your application. For example, if the main screen for your application is a table full of data, provide an image of a table without data to act as a stand-in. When your data is ready to be displayed, the image will be flushed from the screen, and the user experience will feel more responsive.

In this book, we will explore extensions of this, including a pattern for loading application state lazily

–Toby Boudreaux, iPhone User Experience, page 15; emphasis mine.

I’ve always hated splash screens, from the first time I turned on a computer. They get in the way of what I want to do. I want to write, or draw, or play — but if I launch Word, or Photoshop, or any game, I have to sit through a splash screen before I can get to it.

Branding a splashscreen is putting your name on a purely negative experience. Nobody wants to wait for their computer. Splashscreens, by definition, force you to wait. It’s hard for me to imagine why anyone wants to associate their brand with a computer not doing what customers want.

iPhone 4 Update

Fast App Switching, introduced in iOS 4, makes splash screens a much worse idea. They won’t consistently display, because sometimes the app will really be resuming, not starting for the first time, when the user “launches” it. Forcing a splash-screen to appear on a resume as well means breaking the “multitasking” experience.

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