Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

In our new HanDBase forums, we were discussing that we have received some comments from customers that say they love how functional HanDBase is compared to the competition, but wish it were as snazzy as some of the slick iPhone apps out there. I agree! Here’s what I wrote in that article:

At any rate, I am not too proud a person to take advice and input on this. I would much rather have a lot of happy customers that love the design than a bunch of people who say it’s ugly but has a great personality So if anyone has any sort of design background and has any thoughts on how to make HanDBase look a little more snazzy, please let me know. In fact, I think I’m going to start a separate thread based on this!

In that spirit, I’d love to get some input from you on possible ways to make HanDBase slicker looking. Here are the things I’ve been contemplating and I’d love for your input on these as well as some thoughts on other possible changes:

1 – New icon. Our original icon for HanDBase looked like this:

When HanDBase v3 came out we were at our prime, when Palm was at it’s peak and we were one of the top selling products for it, we paid a designer to come up with something slicker for HanDBase’s icon. Here’s what he did:

While I don’t recall having any complaints on the look of this, the overall idea of the thumbs up became a problem for some countries that were using HanDBase. It turns out that the thumbs up was offensive in some countries:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/In_what_countries_is_it_offensive_to_make_the_thumbs-up_sign

We heard from relatively few of them, as since the program doesn’t really support arabic, it’s not really of much use in those countries. But in our effort to try to make something more universally unoffensive, I commissioned Brian Houghton, our email technical support guru who happens to be an artist and art teacher by day to make something to what I felt was more descriptive of HanDBase – that is a handheld size container for all your data. The icon he came up with passed the muster in my eyes, but I think when we shrunk it down to icon size, it lost much of it’s sheen and recognizability.

I hear often of complaints about the icon but really could use some input on ideas for an icon that will work well at low resolutions (Palm OS icons are only 31×21 and this same icon needs to scale up to 128×128 and even higher, so whatever it is has to be easily modifiable to work in hi-rez and low rez both. The standard icon design for a database is an ugly cylinder which I feel is a step back to the 80’s, so hopefully something else more exciting and yet still obvious!

2- New color scheme: When I first designed HanDBase, there was no app store yet, just the promise of one coming soon. The only apps we all knew and loved were the built in apps and they all had a similar business like grey with pin stripes. This is the look and feel I tried to emulate when designing the program, but I did experiment with a scheme with more black which I liked. It definitely looked more slick to me but I didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb from the built in apps! In reality, almost every app that has come out uses different color schemes and it’s even invited by Apple, so I guess in retrospect this was a bad call on my part! I’m planning on implementing this again, but having an option to go back to the current scheme for those who prefer it the way it is.

3- Does anyone have any other ideas for ways the interface could be snazzier? I’m wide open to ideas at this point, but please don’t be offended if we don’t wind up using your idea. I don’t have a budget to spend on a designer right now- it’s tough economic times for us all, but if we can try to do the best with whatever we have, we may be able to something nice here!

Thanks in advance for all your input on this!

It seems that after years of failed attempts to take over the world, Java is finally reaching the tipping point of the future of programming.  I remember hearing the original promises of write once, run everywhere, and almost humorously finding from programmers that it rarely ever worked out that way.

Well, 10 or so years later, we’re seeing that Java and Javascript really are becoming the standard.  First RIM and the BlackBerry OS getting rid of native c development a few years back, now Google Android OS, and even the Palm Pre.  I guess the time is really upon us for good this time.

I just have to be honest- I can’t believe that this is the best we can do.  The concept of Garbage collection being run by a virtual machine over a programmer being smart about memory allocation/deallocation is just one example of what I feel is a step backwards not forwards.  Or maybe the step forwards is that programmers just don’t have to be as smart as they used to?

I remember speaking with programmers who were older than I, and used to laugh at their inflexibility to new ideas and programming paradigms.  Now I’m one of those crotchety old dudes who is complaining about it- when I was a kid we had to deallocate memory when we were done with it!

I guess sooner than later I’ll find myself identifying with the old man from the Pixar Movie Up!  Have to run now and find myself some helium tanks for all these balloons…