Ulysses' Companions' Odyssey (provisional app review)

Posted by 22111
Apr 19, 2022 at 05:44 PM

I had overlooked a partial screenshot on their home page which shows that the item icons can get colored, not only grey. I hope these colors are attributable by the user, not fixed; anyway, I have seen - and tried - colored icons in other applications, and I am positive that different icon colors, without being totally useless, are very, very far away from the very high usefulness of colored and formatted title entries, there really is “no comparison”, as they say. The reason for this enormous difference in practice - which you wouldn’t suspect, without really trialing both - being that when visually “gathering” specific entries, with title colors, i.e. browsing the entries of that colors, and only those, i.e. while ignoring all other entries, you will, at the same time, read those titles (partly, but sufficiently in order to decide it the item is the “right” one, or if you have to look further), whilst, with just colored icons, you will have to constantly move your vision to the left, for the color, then to the right to, now consciously, partly read the item title (this takes time, and unnecessarily asks for your attention, i.e. “breaks your flow”), then again to the left in order to identify the next item of that kind, and so on and on and on, so believe me, colored titles vs. colored icons, that’s a completely different ball game.

Then, it seems that this app does not even allow to bolden titles, to make important, “core” titles “stand out” from the “crowd”, but we all know - there is scientific research available on that matter - that one of the beauties of (strict or pseudo-) hierarchies is the fact that you will have some, more or less preconscious, spatial representation of the location of what you’re aiming at, looking for, at least for your important items, but then zooming in, from “vicinity search” down to correct identification (for clicking, selecting), is helped enormously by bolding your target, and every time, your “search time” will be cut to a fraction.

Ditto for your mental representation of “what is important here”: if you were able to “highlight” it, by bolding it, or then, to “highlight” even more important items by making them bold-blue, you will, upon further “visits” of those vicinities, have an immediate feeling of familiarity, instead of needing to try to “familiarize anew” with those matters, every time.

With colored icons at least, this conscious effort on each and every “visit” - which would have been totally dispensable, had the developer cared about the “laws” of user-screen interaction, amply known for at least two decennials now - will be significantly shortened indeed, but - see above for colored items vs. just colored icons in front of them - it will be a conscious effort, instead of the developer allowing you to do just a preconscious, brief glance over the items present on screen (about 40, 50, according to your font size and screen resolution), and “getting it”, with no effort; of course, for such a “shortcut to the relevant” to function, you might not bolden too many items.

As it is, many Apple software developers try to make their applications sleek, elegant, minimalist, undervaluing rational user interface requirements, and if the app in question does not allow to format titles (I might miss this functionality though, having no access to a trial), this should be for such a reason, since both the colored icons and the factory title “coloring”, white vs. grey, prove that the components currently used allow for user-assignable coloring (and probably formatting, too).

Btw, I suppose that, in contrast to some other such Mac and iPad apps, at least the Mac app in question allows for storage and working within the device, i.e. with no web connection needed, except for repeated license verifications; if that is a misconception of mine, and this is just another web app, I’d never ever touch this app indeed.