A new game from Ryan Cash and company (the same guys who made Checkmark). Circles is a bit like Simon, in that it’s a memory game, but you earn coins and you can use those to buy weapons which you can use to mess up your opponent’s gameplay. The design of the app is great — I love the clean and open feel of the graphics. And Built by Snowman is donating a portion of the proceeds to Alzheimer’s research for as long as the app is available for sale.

Just $2 in the App Store.

Circles

Some great advice from my friend, Randy Murray. When I first took this site full time, Randy called me up to give me some advice about working from home and it has stuck with me.

Being your own boss and working out of your own home has a lot of advantages (you can set your own schedule, you can take breaks in the middle of the day, you can take a day off when there is nothing to do). But that it also has a lot of challenges (it can be distracting, it can be hard to keep work and personal time separated, it can be easy to work way too much).

Randy’s advice to me was to take advantage of the advantages as much as I could because the challenges would be unrelenting. Because what’s the point of working in an environment like that, with all its difficulties and challenges, if you’re not also going to enjoy its benefits?

On Working From Home

Some of these designs look like what you’d find inside a Feltron Annual Report. In the movie, I remember all the computer interface designs as also seeming quite functional and not over-the-top designed beyond any real-life usability. One of the UX details that stood out to me was when Vika needs to send a file to her correspondant who is on the TET. Vika taps and drags the file from one window and drops it onto the video chat she’s having with the TET — a similar movement to when we move icons around on our iOS Home screens.

The ‘Oblivion’ Graphics

Great post by Nik Fletcher about the importance of thoughtfulness and details in copywriting as it relates to app development:

Terminology, abstract concepts, implementation details and bad translations are all things that need careful consideration.

A few weeks ago I did a week-long series of Shawn Today shows talking about design details, and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t address copywriting once. When talking about sweating the details, it’s not just the pixels we should be sweating, it’s also the copy.

Copywriting is Design

I saw Oblivion last night and thought it was excellent. Equally excellent is the movie’s soundtrack, which was written and arranged by M83 and Joseph Trapanese. Trapanese also helped arrange the music to Tron: Legacy, which is why if you liked that soundtrack you’ll no doubt like Oblivion’s as well.

The soundtrack is also available on Rdio, which is where I’m listening to it as I type this very sentence.

The ‘Oblivion’ Soundtrack [iTunes Link]

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Some folks dislike the stock email app on the iPhone. I am, however, fond of it; it’s fast, easy to use, and works well enough for how I manage my emails (deleting most, archiving the rest).

But I keep my Mail app buried on my second Home screen. Because: (a) I need all the help I can get to not to check my email from my phone whenever I have a down moment; and (b) even when I do check email from my phone it’s not a very productive activity.

There’s a new iPhone email app, Triage, in town. I discovered the app thanks to Federico Viticci’s review on Monday, followed by John Gruber’s endorsement on Thursday. That was enough for me to give the app a shot, and after 48 hours with it, I’m impressed.

In his review, Viticci wrote:

Triage’s focus is on letting you decide which messages will require more attention later, and which ones can discarded now. Triage is based on a simple, efficient, and rewarding process that works by leveraging the iPhone’s most obvious gesture and one-handed operability. Unlike other new email apps, Triage doesn’t let you scan your inbox to turn messages into to-dos: it uses a one-message-at-a-time approach to see what’s up, what needs attention, and what can be kept for later.

Triage isn’t the answer to the habit I’ve formed of checking email at every grocery store line, car wash trip, and commercial break. But I do think it will help to turn casual iPhone email checking into something more productive than the scanning and ignoring I usually do.

Triage