A while ago I wrote a quick review about Screenshot Journal, a utility to archive and investigate iPhone and iPad screenshots on the go. It features a zooming capability of up to 400% to inspect single pixels in order to easily find design flaws, but to transfer those screenshots back and forth, I personally use Pastebot. As I recently found out, developer Bjango offers a kind of a mixture of these two worlds: Skala.

Skala is a tool for designers to easily check iPhone or iPad UI designs (or other creations like wallpapers, etc.) they made on their computers on the screen of iOS devices. Skala comes in two apps: Skala Preview on the Mac — which ironically features a 3D version of the feared OS X beachball as its icon — and Skala View on iOS. The latter obviously works on both the iPad and iPhone, but because the design is the same in both cases, I’m going to focus only on the iPhone version here. Read more

Good design certainly is not all to care about. Sometimes, a nifty UI can solve many problems or even hide certain failures in functionality. But it can be as perfect and unique as conceivable — if a product doesn’t work at all, good design cannot change that. Unfortunately, I came across a very good example for this: World Atlas by Technoplus. I only tested the iPhone version, so I cannot tell anything about the usability of the separately sold iPad app yet. But on the iPhone, it’s easy to sum up World Atlas as a well-designed, yet pretty useless app, coded without real care for good UX and features. Read more

Nobody likes being ill, but thanks to software, nowadays we have a series of better options and tools to ease the process of logging our health. When it comes to heart attacks and related issues, obviously the first thing to measure is the blood pressure. It lays out the overall situation of our body and is a good measure to compare the health over time. Most people who need to check their blood pressure over a longer period of time use paper notebooks or little post-its for that — at some point this method is doomed to result in chaos. To ease up this process of archiving blood pressure results and to allow for easy comparisons, Peter Bajtala and Matt Ludzen developed Bloodnote for iPhone.

Bloodnote is designed as minimalist and simple as possible and does not need any big tutorial or explanation for its feature set. It saves your blood pressure results for later and you can fetch them again, whenever you like or need to. It features the standard division into systolic and diastolic pressure as well as the pulse frequency. You can flick through the past results and view them with a single tap. These are basically all features the app has to offer; they’re certainly useful, but when reviewing Bloodnote for a design series, it’s much more interesting to analyze how these features are embedded into the app’s UI.

The three values are displayed using differently colored (red, blue and green), nearly full circles. The whole app is — besides the colored circles — designed in various shades of beige, and within the circle, a darker area is indicating optimal results as a benchmark. A legend at the bottom of the screen connects the color to their respective values (red for systolic, blue for diastolic pressure and green for pulse frequency). Tapping and holding one of them dims the colors of the other circles to focus on one specific value. To enter a new value, you just tap the respective circle, drag up or down until the indicator (which automatically pops up) shows the right value. The dragging interaction is sensitive and pretty smooth, and it’s very easy to get exactly your currently measured value. Tapping the date indicator at the top brings up a slide calendar to move to a specific date in the past and take a look at the respectively measured results.

Bloodnote is a really thought-out iPhone app. Its design just serves the functionality and makes it both simple and — if you can say that — fun to a certain extent as well. It makes recognizing the different values as well as changes over time very easy, and therefore is a very good and time-saving way to enter and archive blood pressure results. You can get Bloodnote for $1.99 on the App Store.

What do you prefer when it comes to apps: functionality or ease of use? Most people would answer “a combination of both, a good compromise”. It might be true in many cases, but sometimes the balance between those two sides is not the right goal, and to meet a specific niche you need to move into more extreme directions. Invy, a new iPhone app by Bread & Pepper, helps you to set up meetings or dates and inviting friends, family or colleagues to them, and it’s a good example how such a hard decision can turn out pretty well.

Creating appointments and inviting other people to them is nothing new; it’s more or less integrated in any sophisticated calendar or even mail application. Because of this, often developers cannot focus on functionality while creating new apps in this area anymore; they either need to create a gorgeous design to convince users to buy their product, or they need to make one specific feature a must-have. Here lies the reason why I chose writing about Invy: it has got both.

When firing up Invy for the first time, you’ll need to register your email address from which you’ll send out invites to other people. To create a new event, just tap the create button at the top, set the date’s description and location, invite recipients, set day and time and hit send. Within seconds, everyone you invited will get the same information in their inbox (emails are designed similarly to the app; see image below). Invitees can accept or refuse to participate: those who have Invy installed on their iPhone will be brought to the app, while everyone else can confirm the date via the Invy website.

All your set dates are displayed in a very elaborately designed list view in the app’s main window. By tapping one of them you can investigate all the attached details and how many people already answered the invite. If you set up the date, you can modify and fix it, and Invy automatically saves the appointment in iCal — and thus on every device with iCloud sync. Invy is intuitive and serves exactly one need: setting appointments and dates easily, and with style.

Responsible for Invys good UX is its clean and bright design, which is centered around the use of big, colored sans-serif typography and white background to automatically focus on the most important information: the dates you set. The big date descriptions change their color when they go through the process of sent invites, answered invites and fixed dates moving from a light blue (just sent) to red (fixed and saved date). This doesn’t just look good, it also ensures a fast recognition of whether a date already is important to you or not.

So Invy is a great date planning app, but nothing more. It has a really focused feature set, and serves those features in a fast, easy and good-looking way. I recommend Invy as a way to plan dates within small groups of people, like in businesses or families, especially when all members have got an iPhone and are likely willed to pay $1.99 for Invy on the App Store.