TapFancy

I wish there were more sites just like this one. TapFancy is a simple showcase of hand-picked apps which allows you to easily scroll through screens of each one.

iOSpirations

Another great showcase of app screens along with website designs for Mobile Safari, iPad apps, game designs and app website designs.

The iTunes App Store

This one seems pretty obvious, but iTunes includes screen shots of most apps and really is an easy way to quickly browse them all. It's suggestions are also great if you want to compare designs of similar apps.

iPhone Apps Gallery

This site provides a screen shot of each app and links directly to the iTunes app store.

CSS iPhone

CSS iPhone focuses on site design in Mobile Safari. Not exactly app design, but still worth a browse.

Dribbble

Dribbble encourages designers to share sneak peaks of projects they are currently working on. Although I like to browse all submissions, the iPhone tag is a great filter and lets you see only the iPhone related items.

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Another new feature on BxB: Apps We Use (and Love!). Every few weeks somebody from team BitMethod will be offering up a feature on apps that we’re using in the real world and really appreciate. Igor is up first with an iPhone app review, though we’ll also be featuring web and maybe even desktop applications as well.

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This one is for all the road warriors out there. After trying to figure out the best possible mileage tracking system (for a while, nothing beat a notebook and a pencil in the car), two years ago I stumbled upon a better solution: Trip Cubby. Trip Cubby allows you to keep track of the miles that you drive in your car that you can deduct from your taxes or get reimbursed for.

Trip Cubby makes it easy to collect all of the needed data and get the data out of the software into an easily digestible file format you can pass on to your accountant at the end of the year or the HR department when it’s time to get expenses reimbursed.

Say I have a sales appointment across town and have to drive there in my Yugo 65e (in almost perfect condition with only 234,508 miles [$500 to a good home])…Trip Cubby only needs three pieces of information.

1. The purpose of the trip. I usually enter a short description about who I’m meeting and what for.
2. The destination, which is usually the name of the company or restaurant where the meeting is being held.
3. The odometer readings at the start and end of my trip. This is made easier by the fact that the app remembers the odometer-end entry from the previous trip that you’ve recorded.

Done! It automatically dates the entry and adds it to the list of previous entries. It will let you export this list as a nice little spreadsheet — just imagine all the possibilities with that data.

This is just scratching the surface. You can setup frequent trips you take to make entering the information even faster. Say you have a client that you drive to from your office four times a week and don’t want to have to renter every time. Setup a frequent trip and select it when you are creating a new entry, adjust the mileage if it’s off, and you are done.

The app will also let you tag individual entries, which makes it easy to export mileage based on a particular tag. Say you want to differentiate between a sales and a support trip, or you are working for two divisions in a company and they require you to submit mileage based on the division that you did the work for. Tag the entry with the appropriate tag, and voila! — you have two sets of entries that you can use to generate the report from.

I could easily write another five paragraphs about everything the app will let you do to track this information, but instead I’ll just throw this data out there: last year I put 3,582.39 miles on that Yugo. The current rate the IRS will let you deduct from your taxes is $0.50/mile for business travel. The app paid for itself after the first 10 miles. Go ahead and get it (iTunes Link) for yourself.

I really, really, really, really like the blog Clients From Hell. It’s annoying for people in the office when they post an update, because I will immediately read most of them out loud. It’s funny, it’s fast, and it exists without any narrative from the blog itself – all content is created from user submitted stories. The design is simple, clean and stylish as many Tumblr blogs are. Posts get liked and reblogged like crazy on Tumblr and it’s pretty popular in its own right.

The site is run by MetaLab, a successful interface design company that boasts “Simple is Beautiful”. That’s true for many of their projects, but certainly not all. While MetaLab is pretty awesome overall, the hard truth is that simple isn’t beautiful when it’s boring, too. The Clients From Hell app epitomizes boring.

I’m not sure that most would be able to tell the difference between the mobile site automatically generated by Tumblr and the app built by MetaLab. In fact, the application ends up with less functionality than the mobile site. I cannot think of many reasons for downloading this app other than to “see what it does.”

Okay, so it’s a simple site with a simple app, what’s the problem? One dollar. The CFH app is not free. One dollar will buy you any number of great apps on the app store. I won’t miss my dollar – it’s a tax write-off now, right? – but to create an app offering an experience inferior to the free one in every way and then ask for money for it seems a bit odd to me.

People are going to be expecting more and more out of their apps as smartphones become more ubiquitous. Consumers will be getting increasingly savvy about what is possible with an app, and know when they are getting ripped off. Recently, Apple has been cracking down on licensed cookie cutter apps that simply syndicate RSS feeds — the Clients From Hell app isn’t much more than that. To warrant more than a “dollar donation” for their foray into the mobile space, a lot more functionality is needed. Maybe die-hard fans are comfortable throwing a dollar at a lame app from their favorite musician, but even that is a stretch.

I hope that MetaLab takes a second stab at their CFH app in the future. Here are some possibilities for immediate improvement:

• Post by post navigation – something that would be helpful with longer stories (and is already available on the mobile site).
• Visual indication of what I have and have not read.
• Landscape view & text zooming like Mobile Safari allows.
• Copy/pasting of choice little bits I want to share with someone or use as a tease to link on Twitter.
• A fave star in the corner so I don’t have to inexplicably click twice to add something to my favorites (and SOMETHING to do with my favorites once I have them – what is this feature for, again?)
• Instapaper support – another thing I already have via Mobile Safari.

And that’s just the basics. If the only primary action you have to offer your users is the ability to read a site that is already quite easy to read on the iPhone, you might want to consider giving them a little something extra for their money. Some random ideas off the top of my head:

• An illustrated client-from-hell voodoo doll I can hold a lighter to or put stickpins in to relieve stress.
• A sleek and stylish interface to submit stories.
• A stupid photo toy that lets me add devil horns to my contact photos to remind myself not to pick up the phone when a client from hell calls.
• A weekly comic only available via the iPhone app.
• Clients From Hell bingo with cards for different industries that I can play during terrible meetings.

In the end, I think doing nothing may have been a better option than doing something. Simple can be beautiful – I don’t think the app needs complication or heavy engineering to make it worthwhile. However, a little more effort into translating the existing concept into a compelling new product for the App store would go a long way.

BitMethod will be launching a new humor-blog product soon, and it lends itself very well to an iPhone app. If we reach that point and can’t imagine any functionality or purpose beyond “have an app in the store”, we’re not going to do it, plain and simple. Just because you can do something with technology doesn’t mean you should – a truism a great interface design company like MetaLab has likely internalized. Alas, even the best of us stray from the path sometimes.

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