Well, it’s that time of the year again, I’ve packed my bags and me and my girlfriend are off to celebrate 3 days of guaranteed fun at Lowlands 2008. Lowlands is a musical festival, with a huge line-up of artists, cultural events, and great food and people. It’s the third year I’m attending.

This year’ll be quite different than the last, as I’ll be taking my iPhone 3G, and I’ve also taken some time apart to make a beautiful and well-optimized web application for all attendees with iPhones and iPod Touches; LL4iPhone. With permission of the festival organisers, I could use some of their decals and branding in the app to give it a consistent feel. It was quite an interesting personal assignment to flex my poorly trained Javascript and PHP muscles, but it worked out quite nicely in the end. You can check it out at LL08.com (you’ll be automatically taken to the web app if you’re on an iPhone); it’s entirely free to use.

I will also try to update with pictures and text from twitter and perhaps even this blog post by using iPhone applications, if my battery levels allow it. If you’re at Lowlands, give me a call or email so we can meet up!

All of these applications are linked to the iTunes Store, so click the link to proceed to their iTunes page with screenshots and other information.

Twitterrific. - Iconfactory (free or € 7,99)

The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific is already reknowned as the premier client for the microblogging service Twitter on the Mac, and they’ve expanded to the wonderful iPhone and iPod Touch platform. Looking at the screenshots, it boasts a unique and beautiful UI, with familiar characteristics from the desktop application like replies to your tweets that are highlighted in orange. As with the desktop version, the ad-supported version is free, and a ‘Premier’ version is available for €7,99 (I believe this is about $9,99 in the USA).

Tuner. - Nullriver (€ 10,49)

Although pricy, Nullriver (known from their efforts on ‘jailbreak apps’, i.e. applications developed before the official SDK was released) has also come forward with an internet radio tuner with a fresh interface. I know first-hand that Nullriver has made some excellent iPhone products prior to Tuner, and the application looks very attractive for on-the-go music. Certainly an app I would purchase.

Tipulator. - Tap Tap Tap (€ 0.79)

WhereTo. - Tap Tap Tap (€ 2.39)

WhereTo and Tipulator could be considered the absolute cream of the crop in the App Store when it comes to UI. With a few exceptions, no application in the store comes close to the level of polish and detail that can be seen in these applications by the new Tap Tap Tap team. The developers and designer in the team are quite well known; Sophia Teutschler (perhaps you know CoverSutra?), John Cassanta (MacHeist et al) and the very skilled designer Wolfgang Bartelme have produced some excellent applications under this label. I’d recommend checking these apps out first when you get around to browsing the App Store on your portable.

Remote.. - Apple Inc. (free)

Interestingly, Apple themselves released a freeware application on the app store that lets you control iTunes. It’s a very straightforward and iPhone-native application that blends in with the other pre-supplied iPhone apps in an elegant way. No more getting off your couch to skip that album or to switch the speakers you’re sending audio to; Remote lets you do this all from your iPod Touch or iPhone. A very welcome addition to the iTunes featureset.

Trism. - Demiforce (€ 3,99)

I have been playing Trism since the trial version became available on the jailbroken iPhone installer. It’s a very easy to learn and fun game that works with the accelerometers in the iPhone to add an extra dimension to an otherwise unremarkable puzzle game. Cleverly thought up, Trism is one of the more fun games in the App Store, but its graphics aren’t really up to par when compared to the heavy-hitters like Super Monkey Ball.

Moto Racer. - Freeverse (€ 7,99)

Freeverse is also releasing a very impressive 3D racing game called Moto Racer. This speedy game allows you, just like Pangea’s Cro-Mag Rally, to race through detailed 3D environments by using your iPhone as a steering wheel of sorts. Since words don’t really do its gameplay justice, I recommend you just grab it and play it!

Sketches. - Late Night Soft (€ 5,99)

Sketches is also one of those apps that’s been developed before the official SDK was even around. However, Late Night Soft has expanded significantly on its featureset, adding a very innovative and natural interface for managing multiple sketches. Sketches lets you ‘fingerpaint’ sketches, add graphics to photos and maps and interact with the results easily.

Netter’s Anatomy. - Modality Inc. (€ 31,99)

Also featured in the WWDC 2008 keynote, Netter’s Anatomy by Modality is really a niche product for medicine students or people who are active in the medical sector. It is a comprehensive studying and reference application with information on the entire human body and anatomy. The interface is a true work of art, looking crisp, native, and very intuitive (especially for such a ’sophisticated’ application). If you fit the target audience, I’d certainly bite my lip and pay the (relatively) steep price to purchase Netter’s Anatomy.

Telegram. - Polar Bear Farm Ltd. (€ 7,99)

Telegram is a novel app by Polar Bear Farm that lets users send each other short audio messages, in their words ‘combining the best of three major mobile communication types’ (email, SMS, and calling). The interface is very nicely thought up, although the technical (graphic) implementation of it is a bit shoddy. I think it’s a very cool idea to wrap such a service (a 1-year subscription to their voice messaging ‘backend’) into an iPhone app and make it easy to use with a unique UI. Telegram retails for the going shareware iPhone app price of 9,99 dollar.

Exposure - Connected Flow (free or € 7,99)

From the makers of flickrExport on the Mac, Exposure is an iPhone application following the model of Twitterific; a free version, and a ‘Premium’ edition. Both free apps feature advertisements from the Deck, a non-obtrusive and high quality advertising network. Exposure lets you browse flickr from your iPhone, keep track of your friends’ photos, comment on photos, and, most interestingly, find pictures on flickr that have been taken near your location. This feature sounds absolutely fascinating to me, as it’s very useful to see pictures taken near you (imagine landmarks, or other points of interest and navigation aids).

These are my favorite App Store debut apps; I hope I’ve whetted your appetite for the applications that will come rolling in in due time that also carry some great graphics from my hand. For now, you will have to wait until at least August to see some of those, but trust me: it’s worth the wait!

Digg this!

The problem I want to address can be referred to as ‘Swiss Interface Syndrome’, and its symptoms extend to the apparently randomly distributed presence of Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann’s 1957 typeface — Helvetica — in the graphical user interface. Helvetica is, without a doubt, the most used and abused typeface in existence. Since its birth, it has grown from a fad, into a ubiquitous beacon of neutrality, and today into an even more omnipresent showcase of classic Swiss typeface design. Unfortunately for us, Max Miedinger did not exactly have computer screens, Aqua source lists and pixel font sizes in mind when designing it. After all, all of those things weren’t even invented. Which is why you can probably see why using Helvetica in something like an application sidebar is such a mortal sin.

Mac OS X comes with, in my opinion, one of the best typefaces of our time that is optimized for the computer screen (also more shortly referred to as a ’screen font’); Lucida Grande, designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. If you are using Mac OS X, you won’t have to look far to find it; your top menu bar is completely set in it, your Dock labels are, most of your browser interface is, and even the sidebar of this website is set in it (by my own preference). It’s also obvious why Helvetica and Lucida Grande are so different; one has been designed before any computers existed, and the other was designed in 2000, with pixels in mind. Obviously, Lucida Grande isn’t as neutral or multipurpose as Helvetica; it has the clear appearance of a small-point size typeface that doesn’t work comfortably at large sizes or in print. But that is not an issue if you take into account its design principles. In those tiny text sizes of our interface, Lucida Grande truly shines. It completely gets out of your way and remains extremely legible.

Now you should be able to see why I found myself in a state of utter disarray and bewilderment when the runner-up of last year’s ‘Best Leopard Application’ Apple Design Award had an interface that proved to be more riddled with Helvetica than a keyboard is with buttons. And it set another precedent; applications like Outspring Mail, the recently released $95 mail client for Mac OS X, also joyously frolicked into the crowd of Helvetica-like interface enthusiasts by applying Arial and Helvetica liberally across source lists and list views (I thought this was Helvetica, but John Gruber pointed out it is Arial in the source list). I was at first merely outraged by the usage of Helvetica in the sidebar (I mean, three letters: ‘Why?’), which is bad enough in itself, but it’s not just limited to that; it bleeds into list views, graphs, sheets, and tables, for… well, what really? The reasons are a mystery to me.

Honestly, why? Why bother to change the sidebar and list view font?

While Helvetica fails to bother me on a high-resolution screen like the iPhone in large point sizes, the shadow of its former self known as the ‘hinted’ version, for the tiny pixel sizes it is used in in these applications, is a grim wreckage of the neutral typographic style reduced to a format it’s not comfortable in. Lucida Grande, that towers above these depressing interfaces as the window title (thank the powers they didn’t change that too) stands out like a tiger in a lineup of kittens in glass bottles.

The left numerals of reconciled value and total value are set in Lucida Grande, and the jaggy numerals on the right graph are set in Helvetica. This is a screenshot of an Apple Design Award runner up, which means Apple basically approved this typographic misbehavior.

My biggest problem isn’t actually with the tasteless use of just going with Helvetica, the ‘default font’ of the last 30 years, but so intensely tearing the font out of its comfort zone of small but not minuscule pixel font sizes. Arial, Microsoft’s Helvetica clone, is also shipping on Mac OS X computers for the sole reason that its very different and optimized hinted pixel version is indispensable for correctly displaying a lot of websites. It eludes me why anyone would choose Helvetica over Lucida Grande other than the virtue that it’s different and Apple is using it.

As with most new Mac interface fads, changing a well-established interface font isn’t something that would be done by developers and interface designers without a reassuring precedent. In the last products of Apple, Helvetica has become quite poignantly present. It has expanded into Apple’s product lineup like an oil spill, from the iPhone and iPod Touch interfaces, to the new iLife suite of applications and OS X Leopard (what, you didn’t notice iPhoto, iCal, and Time Machine’s interfaces have been liberally sprinkled with Helvetica?). It is clear Miedinger’s brain child is the true comeback kid.

iPhoto ‘08 using Helvetica in its main content view.

Speaking of iCal, which proudly boasts Helvetica in miniature point sizes on the screen, it has the utterly mind boggling feature that it shows you calendar information on a computer screen with everyone’s favorite 1950 typeface for print, and prints these exact calendars on paper in Lucida Grande, a computer display font from this milennium. ‘Utterly backwards’ might be an apt term for such misfit typography. With these kind of typographic failures, I truly wonder if there are still designers working at Apple with any typographic sense in their Miedinger-tainted brains at all.

Hey, look on the bright side, at least they’re not mixing Lucida Grande and Helvetica numerals too.

Apple’s receiving some flak here, and it’s for good reason; for Vista and Office, Microsoft commissioned some of the best type designers on this planet to make a set of great new typefaces. Vista now ships with a proper UI font (no more hinted Arial and Verdana like in Windows XP) similar to OS X’s Lucida Grande, and with a typeface assortment that makes OS X pale in comparison. Apple may have had the upper hand in 2002, but as the times have changed, Apple has done absolutely nothing to keep its catalogue of type fresh and to add more and better typefaces to it. This reflects in the world of design around us, seeing that 90% of computer users create things with the system-provided set of typefaces. I find it the worst example possible that a company — that is supposed to be so design-oriented — can make. Please don’t tell me I should just switch to Windows if I like proper typography, because I’d much rather get punched in the face repeatedly than being forced to switch to something else than OS X, where the ‘details’ matter.

Edited note: If you feel like further bringing this to Apple’s attention, consider sending them feedback or digging this.

I’d like to conclude this plea for common sense with the best educated guess I could find on the actual reasons for a Helvetica popularity surge in this day and age. Erik Spiekermann, a great type designer, was asked in the eponymous Helvetica movie;

“Why, 50 years later, is [Helvetica] still so popular?”

Erik stares into space a few seconds, pondering, sighs, then answers:

— “I don’t know… Why is bad taste ubiquitous?”

I also found John Gruber’s ‘Firefox vs. Safari’ post interesting, being in my Latitude browser state of mind, as he prefers Safari over Firefox for its, yes, superior UI. I’ve complained about this before on the blog, and it seems I am not the only one.

Also, talking about interface design and resolution-independence, I hope you have not missed the video of Cabel Sasser’s C4[1] talk - he posted the slides and a Photoshop file used in the presentation on his blog this week. Be sure to view the video if you haven’t seen it yet!