Opinionated

A tale of two pretty user interfaces

Once upon a time there was a HP TouchPad app. Not just your average, run-of-the-mill kind of TouchPad app but a really, really pretty one. And besides being really pretty it had some serious brains as well. It was called ‘Scientific RPN Calculator’. I can’t even estimate anymore how many hours of work have gone into this application but… my wife probably can. Let’s just say it’s an extraordinary number of hours.

The application was ready to roll on the day the HP TouchPad launched. I loved it. The users loved it. The representatives from the HP WebOS team loved it. I guess it was safe to say that this app got quite a bit of love. One of the reasons everybody loved the app so much was the fact that it’s user interface was a lovingly crafted rendition of the classic HP15C calculator from the 80’s that has been discontinued even before I finished highschool. My father gave me one of these when I was in highschool and it was an absolutely amazing tool that helped me excel at Math, Physics and Chemisty. So anyway, let’s say the interface of the application was my homage to the best calculator ever made. It was beautiful and it was loved by anyone who saw it and used it.

The ‘old’ look. A carefully crafted rendition of the famous classic.

Now it turns out that HP is a very, very big company. And the WebOS team is just a tiny fraction of that very big company. One day, from deep within the darkest part of the bowels of Hewlett-Packard, the sound of a tiny voice started to be heard. At first nobody really knew what it was saying but the little voice got louder and louder until it was impossible to ignore.

“This will not stand! This will not stand!”, said the little voice. “The cheesehead is not the issue here, Dude. I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT…”. “Also, Dude, cheesehead is not the preferred nomenclature. Dutch individual, please.”.

The little voice turned out to be a lawyer. And as far as that lawyer was concerned, this would indeed well… not stand. And stand, it did not. I received an email that Scientific RPN Calculator HD infringes on HP copyright. The reason being the fact that the financial HP12C calculator is still in stores. A whole slew of thoughts rushed through my head, many of which I better not write down here. I had decided to go with the ‘HP 1XC look’ mainly because I’ve seen tons of applications on iOS, Android and other platforms doing the exact same thing, some even including the HP logo in their design, which I had carefully avoided so I figured it was fine. As it turns out it was not. At least it was not for my HP TouchPad application.

“So… Now what?”, I wondered to myself. Am I going to be angry and leave it be? After a night of sleep I came to the conclusion that there was very little to gain in throwing a huge online fit about this so I decided to keep quiet for the time being. Since I knew the entire ex-Palm / WebOS division has absolutely nothing to do with these forces coming from within the bowels of their new overlords the last thing I wanted is to cause them trouble. However, I also knew that there were going to be people asking questions. That’s where this post comes in.

Fairly quickly I had decided that the app had to come back. I wasn’t going to have all the work I put in it destroyed by some lawyer with nothing better to do than to harass a tiny indie app developer. After all, everybody loved this app. At first I figured I’d just make some color / shape changes and all would be fine. It probably would have been but really, it would just mean my beautiful app had been defaced. I decided it could either have a near-perfect ‘HP 1XC look’ or something radically different.

I liked to think that my app has the prettiest user interface of all current TouchPad apps and I very much wanted things to stay that way. And so it happened that I spent most of my free time in the past week on creating a brand new, unique UI for the app. An UI that fits HP’s own slogan ‘Like Nothing Else’. An UI that doesn’t look like any calculator app anyone has ever seen.

“Let’s go for an ‘expensive’ look”, I thought to myself. Brushed steel, leather, a classy, more modern but still retro dot-matrix LED display and a whole bunch of other visual treats. After a week of late-night pixel pushing the work is now done. I’m submitting the application to be reinstated in HP’s app catalog after posting this article.

The new look. Hope you like it.

I’m personally very proud of how it all came out and the fact that I managed to pull this off in only a week or so. I’m also fairly pleased with myself. Had something like this happened 10 or 15 years ago I would probably have reacted quite differently. I’m still a bit sad that someone found it important to make an issue out of something as trivial as this but I’ve learned that this is apparently the way things work these days. As it stands now I suppose I should thank this lawyer. Hope HP gives the guy a nice bonus. The application now has it’s own completely unique and very sleek look and feel. I’m sure some users will be sad that it no longer has the familiar HP 1XC look they have loved for decades but unfortunately that’s reserved for HP itself. So to whoever wants a TouchPad app with this look: Ask HP to create one. As of now they’re the only one who can do so. To whoever has an app on iOS, Android or somewhere else that has this same look and feel I’d say: Watch your back! Someone is out there eager to come after you! It’s something I now don’t need to worry about anymore.

Anyway, I hope you all like the new look and feel. I didn’t want to go cheap on anyone who already owns the app. I hope I succeeded!

To the WebOS team I say: I still love you guys. The TouchPad rocks. WebOS rocks and so does the WebOS community. I hope you guys don’t mind me writing this post. I had to do something to clarify what happened.