User interface design on the iPhone is fun. Really it is work I don't mind doing at all. As a budding Objective-C programmer I feel like I was given so many tools that I don't know what to do with them all. Fortunately I know what to do with nearly all of them and I'm preparing to show everyone with the Shanghai Bus App.

The User interface of the Shanghai Bus App will be a lot different than the user interfaces of Red Rocket Games. For one I am no artist, at Red Rocket I can rely on an artist to take my wireframe with block letters for buttons and make them pretty. And Secondly I don't have the same amount of control in what I can produce on the screen. All of my games have been programmed using a mixture of C# and Javascript using Unity3D. So I will be using boilerplate buttons from Interface Builder. I'll try to get my homeboy Grayson Stallings to give me some kind of art for the project, but I doubt I'll get that out in the first release of the app

iPhone Apps have had many user interfaces, but the best are the ones that use Interface Builder's mechanisms. I've always wanted to use Apple's table view in our games at Red Rocket but its not that simple. Game UIs need to be polished, glowing, shiny, moving slightly, and within the same world as a pretty game related background. The Shanghai Bus App needs none of these things. The user experience is based around getting information. I hope that the Shanghai Bus App's longest time running on the iPhone is around 30 seconds. People are not going to use the app because its fun, or greatly informative. They are going to use it to find the bus they wanted and then hopefully get on that bus. The user interface needs to be functional. 

I see my feature set for the Shanghai Bus App to be pretty slim. Sure Google Maps, Location based searches, and a few other bells and whistles would be great but alas... They are out of scope. I've decided that the bare feature set should be Search and picks. I want the user to find buses outside of the App if possible. and I want people to be able to walk around their neighborhood and pick the Buses near them as favorites and remember them for later use. 

the user interface will focus on these two core functions with a navigation bar at the bottom of the App. One will be a search nav bar and the other the picks. In time I'll add more functionality to this bar but it is the most modular way I've seen to get an App started and prepared for future updates. 

Screen Shots:

Also if anyone has some free time to lend toward art feel free to contact me at paulwoodiii [at] gmail [dot]  com