Tools that feel like a video game.

Some things off the bench are tools. On July 29 one arrived in a single message.

macos screen recording tool. follows the mouse, shows clicks, etc. user uses actual mouse gestures that do things like 'zoom in and out'... shows a marquee while recording. build to completion and deploy as a swift toolbar utility

Elijah · Jul 29

That is reel. It films a screen the way a camera operator would: the frame follows the pointer.

Five days later came Infininote, a sketchbook with depth. The pencil draws, your fingers turn the space, and the lines hang in it. Its first commit was August 3. It was approved on the App Store on August 25.

Juice.

Infininote is where the family's feel got written down. The brief that week was that a creative tool should feel like a video game, and the messages show what that means at the size of a button.

make the dialogs come in in 3d. utilize this planar thing. like spawn at 90 deg and rotate in with some scaling juice.. add some similar juiciness to all the buttons.

Elijah · Aug 5

we are going for a distinct low poly look, as it's part of the waveloop brand

Elijah · Aug 6

Springs. Inertia. A button that squashes under a thumb. On this site it is why things arrive out of a field of noise, a few pixels at a time.

And then, the manual.

A family of apps drifts. A button moves and the help still points at where it used to be. So late that summer, four things became part of every change, in every app.

• The help inside the app changes in the same change as the control it describes.
• Every update opens once with a checklist of what moved.
• Every app has TRAINING: little checklists that tick themselves when you actually do the thing.
• Anything that takes time says what it is doing, by name, with a bar when the work can be measured.

should make it so the checklist items are perpetual. each app should have a training tab in the main header menu, which has little checklists. so 'record your first choppa' is one, auto finishes, with the pullout tab notification to take them to the list which shows an animating checkbox, scrolls to each that are getting checked.

Elijah · Sep 3

anytime there's an operation, there is some indicator that it's working

Elijah · Sep 19

It is what makes five apps feel like one family.