Windows Phone app downloads, one month later

lil todo has been in the app store for about one month now. It hit the marketplace on April 9th and I now have download statistics up to May 8th. And the total number of downloads in the first month is… Drum roll please…

342

Yes, 342 downloads in one month for a free app with no real advertising apart from this blog and a twitter account. Not bad, not great, but decent, I suppose.

There was a large number of downloads in the first week, about 150 and since then it’s leveled off. I’m averaging about 7-8 downloads a day now.

The top three regions for downloads are 1. the US with 198, 2. Germany with 44, and 3. the UK with 33. The next after that is Australia with 12 and Singapore with 11. I wonder if this is a reflection of the Windows Phone user base around the world.

 

Nobody should own four pairs of pajama pants

Like most people who’ve been in the work world for a while, I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff over the years. It’s gotten to the point where I no longer have closet space for new things. Clearly, I’ve got to start getting rid of things, but it’s hard.

Well, I think I’ve started on the right path. I recently picked up The Joy of Less: A Minimalist Survival Guide and today after doing laundry, I realized I can’t comfortably store my clean clothing in the closet or the dresser. So, I decided to start tossing some clothes I didn’t wear, or shouldn’t wear, anymore.

I realized I have four pairs of pajama pants. I know how it happened–I bought one pair first, bought the other while I was away from home for several months, and got the last two as a gift. And yes, I’ve worn them all, but I realized just how wasteful it was to have four. Surely, I only need one pair?

Another quick look through the dresser reveals two pairs of long underwear. Again, I know how it came to be, but I should’ve realized at some point that after purchasing the second pair I could throw out the first.

As I started throwing clothes into a “discard” pile, I started feeling pretty good, actually. Over time, we form an emotional bond with our stuff and it provides some comfort just by being there. But it’s good to get rid of things every once in a while to break free of these chains and to make us realize that we’re more than our stuff or our memories.

I’ll be going through my crap and tossing things out over the next few weeks. I’ll post some of the more interesting things on here as I come across them.

Chromebook: a tough sell

Google put together a cute little ad for their new Chromebook:

The animations and colors are nice, but it doesn’t do a very good job selling the product. From this ad, you can tell Google is run by geeks who are thinking in terms of platforms and the neat things that can be done with new technology and not so much in terms of what end-users are craving.

The ad first makes these basic points:

– Chromebook has no programs, just the web. In fact, it “is” the web.
– Chromebook lets you do everything on the web.
– Chromebook has no “messy” desktop.
– Chromebook can be used anywhere (unlike a laptop?).

I suspect the last point had to be made because people, rightfully, would start wondering, “what if I don’t have internet connection? Can I still use it?” As for the other points, I don’t see them as convincing reasons to move away from a typical Mac or Windows machine.

Well, then they get onto their other points:

– Chromebook starts up quickly.
– Chromebook doesn’t have annoying updates. It does have updates, but they are automatic.
– Chromebook needs no virus protection.
– Chromebook won’t lose your stuff if you toss it in the river.
– Chromebook is “kind of a new thought.”

Again, the above points are nice-to-haves, certainly, but nothing to sell a platform on. What Chromebook needs is a killer app that showcases why a computer with just a browser is better than one with a browser and thousands of other apps.

Regarding virus protection: early on, I suspect it wouldn’t need to require virus protection. However, the likelihood of a platform having viruses is partly a function of the number of users on that platform. ChromeOS can and will get viruses. Any computer that can run bits can get viruses. There are many vectors of entry to run unsigned code, and apps are only one way.

Finally, it’s not really a new thought. The idea of “Dumb” terminals and internet appliances have been around forever.

I’m sure there will be more Chromebook ads in the future, but this first one doesn’t do much to sell the platform. What would really sell it is they had some examples of things that it can do that other platforms cannot. Some video of some actual useful scenarios and features would go a long way.

The thing that ultimately makes Chromebook a tough sell is how it can easily be explained to non-techie people: Chromebook is just a regular laptop that has a web browser and nothing else. They probably won’t listen to the rest of the sales pitch after that.

If I redesigned the Zune client

The Zune software client always looked off to me. Something just wasn’t right about it, but I never really thought about why.

Well, today, I looked a little closer and with an amateur graphic designer‘s eye, I noticed the main problem is just that things don’t line up; margins aren’t consistent and neither is spacing. The net effect of this is that it looks cluttered and disorganized.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate my point. First off, here’s what the software looks like in full screen mode. (Click to embiggen.)

Even if you don’t enlarge the image, you can immediately notice that things along the left-hand margin don’t line up. Things along the right-hand margin don’t line up either. Here’s a marked up version of the above to show you what I mean. (Bigger view here.)

If you look at the lines above, you see there isn’t a whole lot of consistency. It looks like they were trying to go for a grid layout, but failed to line things up correctly. (Also, now that you’ve seen the inconsistent margins, you cannot unsee it. For that, I apologize.)

It gets worse when you resize. (Click for bigger image.)

When the window is resized, you can start to see why some of the layout decisions were made. The reason “ARTISTS GENRES ALBUMS…” is on its own line and right-aligned is that when you re-size, it has to have room along the left to move. (That doesn’t excuse some of the design decisions, of course.) The search field eating away at the “quickplay collection marketplace…” text is particularly ugly.

Just for kicks, I decided to spend an hour to line things up to see if I could improve the visual clutter. I dropped some features along the way to make it work; see if you can spot them. I also took some liberties and copied the style of a great Metro-themed app, MetroTwit, and gave the header some color. Here’s the end result (again, click to make bigger):

What do you think? To me, the above already feels more solid. Things line up along the left, right, top, and bottom. I immediately feel a sense of trust in the software–and I didn’t even fix any bugs!

In my opinion, when things are organized correctly and given a proper layout, the content shines a lot more and you just trust the damn thing more. Your eyes and brain aren’t confused by what is being presented. You immediately see the connection between things because they are intentionally placed.

Coincidentally, I also made the album artwork bigger in the above re-design. There’s a funny feature in the Zune software: if you have a single album in the album artwork section in the middle, the artwork looks big as above. But as soon as there are two or more albums displayed, the software displays smaller artwork. I understand the reasoning behind this from a functional standpoint. You have lots of albums, so show as many as you can so that you can find the one you want.

However, form here is way more important here than function. The album artwork is the star of the show when you’re looking at your music collection. In this digital age, people no longer buy physical media and to really have a connection with the content, which is really just bits, you have to show the artwork surrounding it. Make the art front and center.

Anyway, after doing the above mock-up, I decided to see if anyone else has attempted to re-design the Zune software. It wasn’t long before I encountered some screenshots that looked really nice:

The above re-design really nails it. The margins line up and everything looks rock solid.

Funny thing is, the above isn’t a re-design at all. It’s the Zune software version 2.0. So what happened? As best I can tell, it’s a matter of feature creep without UI re-design. If you compare the 2.0 screenshot above with the latest version of the client (4.7), you can see the following changes:

  • LiveID account info added to top-right corner
  • Zune logo removed and replaced with a gradient rectangle
  • Back arrow moved above the header navigation text
  • Mini player button added to top-right corner, beside minimize, maximize, close icons

The account info and the mini player addition is what screwed up the right margins. The removal of the Zune logo is what screwed up most of the left margins. I’m unsure as to why the Zune device icon in the lower-left is out of alignment now, though. Perhaps they decided to line up those icons with the “quickplay collection marketplace…” header, but failed to line up the artist list.

In closing, what’s the lesson here? When you add new features to software, you’ve got to re-evaluate your UI to make sure it’s still consistent. It looks to me that the above was a result of varying teams adding new features and nobody really making sure that the overall experience was still correct. The other lesson is that good and bad design is all around us. Take a look at the software on your smart phone and ask yourself why it looks nice. You might find that it could simply be a matter of lining up the margins.

As always, I’d love to hear your comments below.

Some nice-lookin’ Windows Phone tiles

I’ve been collecting Windows Phone app tiles in the last month and here are my faves so far. This is a random sampling–other than my own that’s in there, of course. These are just apps that I came across and thought looked nice. In most cases, I’ve never even tried the app, so I can’t vouch for how good they are. But maybe this’ll entice you to download some of them. 😀

Scroll down for links to all apps.