Casey wrote a piece for Kombo.com regarding Apple’s increasing movement into the portable gaming space, and how it affects Nintendo.  Highlights below, full article available here.

The reality is that Apple’s mobile platforms all better meet the demands of mainstream gamers than Nintendo’s DS models. Apple’s devices are miles ahead of Nintendo’s when it comes to multifunctionality. It’s just not a fair fight to compare a DSi to an iPod Touch when it comes to web browsing, listening to music or accomplishing other, non-gaming tasks. The majority of the DSi’s new features were meant to answer these deficiencies, and they did so poorly. 

Nintendo must view Apple as a legitimate threat to its long-term primacy in the portable market, or face certain peril. As it stands, iPhone is a technically superior platform with a compelling user interface and an unbeaten software distribution system. It’s also vastly more capable for non-gaming tasks. The 3DS needs to not just be as compelling, but much more compelling than the forthcoming iPhone update in order to defend the crown.

This is the danger Nintendo accepted when choosing the “mainstream” road in this generation. While incredibly lucrative, the mainstream is also liable to jump off one bandwagon and onto another quickly. Apple currently holds all of the trump cards that Nintendo played just a few years back with their positioning of the DS and the Wii. To write off Apple in this market is just as deadly as it was to write them off in the music, phone and now eBook markets. Apple understands content, and has created devices that make exploring it a joyful experience. 

Whether Mr. Fils-Aime wants to admit it or not, every minute spent playing a game on an iPhone is one less minute with a Nintendo product. And by all accounts, time is running short.

MegatonApps president Casey Ayers sat down recently with MSNBC.com’s Bill Briggs to share his thoughts regarding the differences between Microsoft and Apple at this critical inflection point in the history of both companies.  You can find the full article here. A few excerpts follow below:

“The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind,” said Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps in Jacksonville, Fla. His company soon will release its first iPad app, “Multitaskers” which includes a calculator, ruler, lantern, stopwatch and five more functions.

“Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers, but its inability to leave the past behind has left their product line bloated and dysfunctional,” Ayers said. “Yet iPhone completely changed the mobile space forever. Apple doesn’t blink at making unpopular decisions if it believes they will result in a better end product. … It’s just a matter of time now before Apple blows past Microsoft’s market cap.”

So while Apple cheered its opening weekend of iPad sales, what wish Microsoft should have made when it blew out its birthday candles Sunday?

“More than anything, Microsoft’s birthday wish should be for fearless leadership,” said app maker Ayers. “Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come.”

In this video feature, we talk about what designing quality iPhone experiences means by illustrating the issues with the recently-released Caesar’s Palace iPhone app and giving viewers an inside look at how MegatonApps designed a concept for CityCenter Las Vegas with these topics in mind.

Casey Ayers, President of MegatonApps, LLC, shares his thoughts on Apple’s impending Tablet announcement and why he believes it will replace the laptop’s current role for mainstream users, while the laptop continues to replace desktops at an even more rapid clip than before.

Casey Ayers, President of MegatonApps, LLC, shares his thoughts on how the iPhone has been transformed from a celebrity-status icon to a commonplace utility in just a few short years, and why that’s incredibly awesome. 

It’s an old axiom in design, and one that we get more familiar with every day: Simple design isn’t simple.

If we have a role model out there in the world of industrial design, it would be Apple’s Jony Ive. Ive spoke with Wired back in 2003 about designing the PowerMac G5, which features the iconic aluminum casing that has since been adopted by all of Apple’s computers except the regular Macbook.  He said:

“We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don’t see that effort. We kept going back to the beginning again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?”

This is exactly the crux I found myself in yesterday when working on some concept designs for a major new project.  Unfortunately, I can’t talk much about the project itself, so I apologize in advance if I sound coy at times.  What I can tell you is that one part of this app includes the ability to access a variety of menus (the food kind).  The entire app is being designed using a horizontal aspect.  The issue I was dealing with was in deciding how best to make the menu navigable to users.

The Easy Part

At first this seems easy enough But then the pesky details get in the way.  In this case, the food items were listed in French, with English descriptions, and a need to also display the price.  Should all of this data be contained within a single cell from a group of cells that take up the whole of the screen? Or, should the descriptions appear one at a time to the right side whenever users select from a skinnier menu on the left that just shows the item names? I chose the first route, because it might not be readily apparent to many users that tapping on each food item would cause the description to appear.  Further, for the side menu to scroll correctly while also showing the information we need to stay at the top, this single screen would have three different panes.

After deciding that all item information should appear in the same cell, the next question arrived: How should long food names be handled?  There were three options here. One was to have item names simply cut off after a set number of characters, to be followed with a “…” ellipsis (shown in the first line below.) The next would be to resize the text to get smaller as words got longer, in order to fit it all within a set amount of space (shown in line two below.)  The third option was to allow for multiple lines within the cell (line three below.)

The answer in this case was blessedly obvious after trying each out. In some cases, we don’t like using multiple lines in cells, because it constrains the number of choices you can show on screen at any point in time. Indeed, it’s possible that items with very long descriptions might take up the entire screen at once.  However, the importance of the information, in this case, dictates how the items must be handled.

The Hard Part

In a different area on this same screen, I needed to create a way to sort various menu items.  Users needed to be able to easily switch which area of the menu they were viewing, from appetizers to entrées and desserts.  In all, we had at least five of these sections, with the possible addition of a drinks and kids’ menus.  We tried a number of options out.

Segmented Control

The first option was a segmented control. The benefit here is that there is a visible color difference between the selected tab and the rest of them, while still showing all of the options at once.  The issue here is that it didn’t particularly look good as part of the overall screen. It also was limited in the options it could offer, even while in the horizontal iPhone view.

Bordered Bar

Using a background bar with embedded “round rect” buttons definitely looked better. However, this limited the button real estate even more. Even these five buttons only fit on the screen when cheating slightly by having a few of the pixels on each side bleed off of the screen. The worst part, and the dealbreaker, was that the round rect buttons don’t offer a simple method of changing color, so it would be difficult to indicate which screen a user was currently viewing. To solve this, we’d need an additional title listed below.

A further issue with both of the above options is that they didn’t account for whether the menu was for breakfast, lunch or dinner; in several cases, we would need these different menu types to be accessible.  Either a second bar would have to be placed under the first, which would create touch errors for many users due to the close proximity, or a pre-screen would have to be created, where users selected their menu type before accessing this screen.

We have two key mantras when faced with a situation like this: 1) Keep it all on the screen without crowding the interface. 2) The less taps, the better.  This led us to the solution.

Drop Down Menus

It sounds simple, right? I agree. That’s how I knew that it was the right answer.  It really is as Jony Ive says: users never see the effort required to distill an idea down to its barest and purest form.

The drop downs will activate “pickers”, which are the spinning menus that often appear when filling out a form and choosing from a pool of selections, like what state the user lives in.  In this case, users can pick not just which portion of the menu they’d like to view, but also which meal menu they want that information to come from. This works out because the drop down menus, of course, continue to display the currently selected option.

Final Thoughts

The difference between an app well made and an app made quickly is the amount of thought put into the small parts of the UI, like what is shown above.  That’s what makes me proud of Megaton’s design process: every element is considered, reconsidered and considered again in constant pursuit of the most natural experience.  If we have done our job effectively, users should never make an incorrect action out of confusion or be left unable to figure out how to do something. Options should be clear and easy, even if the labor necessary to develop them is neither.

-Casey Ayers

As John Gruber points out, Windows Mobile 6.5 has launched to the disdain of nearly every reviewer.  We stand among those ranks.  Like every mobile platform, we have examined Windows Mobile carefully to determine whether it might be a fruitful development platform for us. The answer remains no.

Windows Mobile 6.5 demonstrates all too well the confusion that Microsoft has brought to the mobile landscape.  Their Zune HD recently launched to much fanfare and was hailed by many of the same reviewers rejecting WM6.5 today as a great leap forward in terms of design and function. Yet the Zune team was sequestered from the cell phone market, and even applications for the Zune HD have been largely stifled.  Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on their “Pink” phone project, still veiled in mystery, and continues to support the Sidekick platform, which was developed by Danger, a company Microsoft bought last February.

Why does any company, even one the size of Microsoft, need to build four completely separate mobile platforms? This has been, and remains, a strategy of rival divisions trying to outdo themselves and justify their individual existence while hurting the organization as a whole. We believe that this is the result of a lack of leadership and a clear focus from the top: this is what happens when a company the size of Microsoft tries simply to compete with everyone else rather than create a true standard of their own.

The screen shown to the left goes quite a distance toward explaining the woes of WM6.5 overall. We see a screen that staggers the columns familiar to iPhone users vertically in order to provide some sort of visual differentiation from Apple’s product. But the staggering creates a confused look and doesn’t prioritize which features users use most often well. The Phone icon is almost lost in the middle of the screen; any color but blue would have helped it stand out when compared to its icon neighbors (Contacts, IE, and the left side of the Text icon).  

The fact that there’s a “Getting Started” menu at all should have raised concerns at Microsoft. Why is a tutorial program necessary? Why isn’t the interface self-evident? If a tutorial is required, chances are that the UI is not yet as good as it should be.

Even more perplexing, users apparently arrive at this screen via the Start button, instead of seeing the drop-down menu that users have known as The Only Way on Windows platforms for fifteen years. Meanwhile, users taken to a completely different, and very Zune-reminiscent, screen if they press the “Today” button. The “Today” screen offers all of these same options in a completely different way. Among the other issues: Internet Explorer remains horrible and the on-screen keyboard apparently borders on unusable, requiring a stylus for any accuracy.

We’re hopeful about the future of Android and think that Palm’s WebOS holds some promise, as well. RIM’s Blackberry family is simply too segmented for our tastes; there are plenty of Blackberries out there, but the different OS versions and carrier-based App Stores create a scenario where developing one app means developing several very different versions.  But Microsoft’s platforms are simply dreadful. The level of corporate confusion that’s easy for the casual observer to see speaks badly to Microsoft’s ability to ever compete in the mobile sector. And that’s a shame, because the Zune HD proves that there are designers and engineers at Microsoft that are capable of producing a quality platform. In chasing Apple, Microsoft has instead fallen further behind. A unified and focused development platform is the key to success in today’s mobile environment, and Apple remains the only company to truly deliver this thus far.

Images Courtesy Gizmodo