Lauren Brihter for iOS application design

Familiar to all game in the word - only one way to have fun and have fun, but not in the case of Lauren Brihterom. His word game - it is an experiment and attempt to implement the work of the future application model.

In its 28 years Lauren has already left a significant mark in the mobile interface. Familiar to every "pull down to refresh" - his handiwork. Now this interface element is present in almost all popular applications including Facebook and post a native Apple application. He came up with the implementation of quick scrolling. He created 25 years Tweetie app, which has been rightly called the best Twitter client ever existed, it has been bought by Twitter and became the official app of the service.

Brihtera career began where many dream to finish it: six months before the release of Apple College invited him to work in the iPod team, but he refused. After college, he again received a job offer from Apple, this time in a super secret team, Scott Forstall, is working on the iPhone.

Letterpress

Lorena latest creation called Letterpress is a game of words, designed for two players. However, in such a seemingly simple idea were implemented ideas excite the community of designers and developers. On the first day of release in the App Store app downloaded 60,000 times. During the first month in Letterpress it was already one million downloads. But a word game - just a small demonstration of the particles of opportunities hidden in filling applications.

Lauren owns Atebits, in which he is the sole employee. Letterpress In his words, the perceived community as a game for him is not a game more, and Trojan horse, serving only the beginning of "crazy" experiments with displaying graphical content on mobile devices.

He created his own skin the user interface, which connects directly to the graphics processor unit. Despite the fact that Apple provides a tool designer and create something similar to it was absolutely necessary, Lauren thought it was "funny".

Lauren added that he wanted to experiment with a variety of graphics management methods. Tool Apple by far the best, but he wanted to try. Now, millions of users testing the result of his work, and yet the error was identified.

Changes in the App Store

Brihter admitted that he could not say for sure whether the one million downloads in the first month of a good indicator or not. He also notes that Letterpress can not be compared with his first big hit. Tweetie was paid, and the word game - free product.

Many people now talk about how hard small teams and developers to single stand out in a variety of applications, but Brihter not really pining for the old days.

"I started programming 10 years ago with the release of a public beta OS X. Now available to developers a lot of services and tools, such as Cocos2D, GitHub, StackOverflow and others. Now everything is much easier. "

How does Lauren

Definitely Brihter very careful in choosing their projects. In what way he anticipates what ideas will work?

The main thing - everything went. He compares it with a walk in the forest, when at some point you will catch the angle at which all the trees line up perfectly.

"It is necessary to consider each tree. In the case of Letterpress it was obvious. Games are now at the peak of popularity in the App Store, and I wanted to try to come up with a free app and have the opportunity to test with the stack of new technologies. "

iOS design bright future

Design - passion and specialization Brihtera. When he was asked about how it relates to the care Forstalla, Lauren said he did not work directly with him at all. At the same time Lauren willingly shared his thoughts about the coming of Quince in interface software development.

"I admire Ayvom. He has great taste. But what is much more important (pointing his finger at the MacBook Air) it has the ability to choose the ideal materials for the products. But in iOS design I do not like the presence of things that few are applicable to the software. "

"When creating Letterpress I tried to make the application, where you can unleash the potential maximum graphics performance. It seems to me, at Quince same aesthetics. When creating a product, it does not consider it superficially, that is not trying to make a device that would look just fine. "

When Lauren recalled that this approach (unity and harmony of the hardware and software component) was peculiar Apple initially, he agreed that it was, but at some point, the harmony was broken, and he could not say in a.

About skeuomorph

All this talk about skeuomorph too simplistic and generally incorrect. Skeuomorph - it's not just the texture. This includes animation and the operating system, slide to unlock the device, and so on.

"I think that in general skeuomorph - it's not bad. We need animation. Thanks to its interaction with the system occurs in a human form. If we talk specifically about the texture, it is only a design problem, and I hope that their number will be reduced. "

The tip of the iceberg

In the near future plans to pursue Lauren Letterpress, using it as a testing ground for these developments.

"I have a thousand ideas for semifinished products, but first of all I need to focus on infrastructure. It's like an iceberg. No one is trying to solve the fundamental problems that lie beneath the surface. I want to fix it. "

[via gigaom]