Supersize It

The screen is coming together nicely, I think. It actually looks like it had some thought put into it, rather than just being thrown together to capture data.   This is the third of four posts.  You can read parts one and two, as well.

Double the Pleasure - Here, I start playing with the new iPhone 4 hotness. As such the screenshots have doubled in resolution. I went through the process of generating doubled-resolution art assets, and I think the results are nice. I'm still wondering if it's even worth the trouble to store two sets of the UI elements given that the big ones can just scale down. I'm still not sure which way I want to go on that.

I started trying out different ways to save screen real estate and still communicate purpose to the User. I wanted to have a full line for the field labels, as I need to be able to account for localization without localizing the NIB, too. So, this way, I have the entire width of the screen to play with the label length. Combined with adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth, I don't have to worry about truncation or wrapping on the UILabel. I was able to further simplify this design, though, in a later iteration.

This second stab included putting icons on the Severity Slider. The plus and minus didn't gel with the design, so they were changed into horns n' halo. Unfortunately, these icons are too culturally specific, as it turns out, so I abandon them in the next iteration.

Same As The First - This iteration only changed the halo and horn combo into smilie frowny faces. But, there are a bunch of things I didn't touch on in the screen, so I'll talk about them here. I added an inner shadow to the UITextView as Apple doesn't provide that out of the box. Basically, I took a screenshot of a UITextField and Gimped it into a resizeable image to place behind the UITextView itself.

I was experimenting with having the Conscience hover over a cartoony shoulder on the Home screen. The shoulder can be seen as an overlay on the UITabBar here. The idea was that was what was going to tie all the screens together, but I decided that the metaphor of a Conscience hovering over your shoulder was unneeded, ultimately. Additionally, I couldn't engineer a sublime method of showing the Conscience if it happened to wander under the Tab Bar. It would just disappear, but the shirt would remain. That was disjointed, so the whole idea was scrapped. Perhaps, I'll revisit this idea for the iPad version.

One Way Or Another, I'm Gonna Gitcha... - So, I had been stuck on how to allow the User to assign a Severity to the Virtue or Vice that they are entering here. But, it dawned on me, that in general, you only need to give them a screen assigned to a Good Choice or a Bad Choice. If you're going to record something like this, you have it in your head, in general, if this was a moral or immoral action. So, I moved that distinction up to the previous selection screen, and this screen became MUCH more easy to handle. Now, you only determine how Good or Bad a Choice is, not if it's actually Good or Bad. Having made that decision, I had to re-engineer some stuff under the covers here.

Also, I have been trying some different things with tab bar transparency. But, given that the Conscience is going to be on-screen a lot, the implementation of a semi-transparent tab bar becomes extremely difficult to pull off. I drop that idea later on when I discover how much work it's going to take.