![]() Instead, I’m just going to review each app in turn and show how KeepScore improves upon them. I won’t try to justify these principles here, because I think I already did a decent job in this post. Assume your users have big, fat thumbs.If there were two principles from this book that I wish every app developer would follow, it’s these: I mention this book a lot in my blog, but I just can’t emphasize enough how reading it can help make you a better UI designer. My second advantage is that I read and applied the principles in Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design for Programmers. I remembered the frustrations that came with our impromptu game of cribbage: I pressed the wrong button! It didn’t save our scores! The screen fell asleep! Based on this experience, I knew what to avoid in KeepScore. Since the other apps came out first, I was able to test them and see which design decisions worked and which ones didn’t. What makes it better? My first advantage is simple hindsight. My app, KeepScore, only took one weekend to write, but I think it’s already better and more usable than every other scoring app on the Market. I tested the most popular scoring apps on the Android Market, found them all to be underwhelming, and then finally wrote my own. I like thinking about user interface problems, so I followed this rabbit hole all the way to the end. Something about that struck me as wrong – this is the 21st century! Why can’t my damned smartphone keep score? In the end, we were able to score our game, but it would have been much easier to just use pen and paper. The second, Scorer, was workable but awkward. ![]() ![]() The first one we tried out, Score, crashed on us halfway through without saving our game. We didn’t have any pens or paper to keep score, though, so we turned to the Android Market to try to find a good scoring application. Crib is a great card game – it’s fun and fast-paced, it works well with anywhere between 2 and 4 players, and you can finish a round in about a half-hour. Last week I was in a pub having drinks with some friends when we decided to play a little cribbage. ![]()
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