ZenPress Mobile Software

A two year-old plays Count the Animals

ZenPress Mobile Software is a one-man iPhone development shop.  That one man is Eric Normand, who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The iPhone is a beautiful machine.  I especially like multitouch.  Multitouch opens endless possibilities for direct manipulation.  Menus, lists, trees, these all have their place.  But multitouch allows for so much more!

If you create a bubble in Comic Genie, you should be able to manipulate it right there, where it sits.  You don’t want to have to open up clumsy menus.  Using pinch and zoom, you can change its size.  Dragging it moves it.  A single tap brings up the keyboard and you can edit it.  There is no need for parameter menus.  What you see is what you get.  A lot of time is put into designing the interface to work with the most common tasks.

The same goes for the kid’s apps I write.  In Match the Animals, a lot of care went into tuning the app to a two-year-old’s motor skills.  From observational studies, small children had a lot of trouble touching the animals directly on the first try.  There was a lot of touch and slide – and a lot of frustration.  I had to research and experiment different methods detecting input, so that a two-year-old would love to play it.

It’s that kind of care, plus a philosophy that does actively removes unnecessary features that only get in the way, that make my apps fun and enjoyable.