I’ve been reading about Stevens Creek‘s new TripLog/1040 application through some discussions about bad UI. Steven Patt, the author and long time Palm developer (like me, however I stopped a few years back), defends his decisions saying that users want everything viewable on one screen. While this may be true, this app looks like a horrible Palm OS app. It follows none of the Apple UI guidelines and looks nothing like any built-in iPhone application. There is absolutely no excuse for it; some of the buttons are far too small to actually hit on a device. They may work fine in the Simulator, but they are not usable. Then the background color is just awful.
He can justify his decisions all he wants, but this kind of UI just makes the iPhone look like a piece of junk. Developers need to adhere to the guidelines to make the platform look solid. Years ago I wrote an article for one of the Palm conferences about minor things developers could do to polish their apps, like have the correct button sizes and placements. Many Palm OS developers ignored it.
While I’m ranting about software, it was so nice of him to violate his non-disclosure with Apple by posting screenshots of his application. It seems like he wasn’t only in this violation. Does Apple care? I don’t know, but it annoys me to no end that even if I did have an app ready, I would have honored the NDA and not posted anything until I was released from the NDA. I would have hoped that Apple would have punished these developers by not accepting their apps into the AppStore, but this didn’t happen.