Hologram Icons

Icons are important for any piece of software nowadays. But they’re even more important for iPhone apps. With such limited real-estate and no method for doing things like hover-text, your icons have to be simple, clear, and self-explanatory.

So here’s a question: can you guess what each of the icons in my Hologram app does? (Incidentally, that’s my cat Bandit helping me beta test my software.)

4 Responses to “Hologram Icons”

  1. Allen Says:

    I’ll take a crack at it. (Top. Left to right) Take a photo, Increase altitude, Lower altitude, Erase, Un-erase (?), Settings. I’m not sure if “altitude” is really the word I’m looking for, but it’ll do.

    I’m not sure about the slider at the bottom. Maybe it adjusts between blurry/sharp?

    I’m excited to learn more about Hologram! I think I could probably take a guess at what it is now. 😉

  2. Si Brindley Says:

    My thoughts are similar to Allen’s.

    I’m going to assume that the idea of the app is to provide a way to add depth information to an image, so that it can be viewed in pseudo-3D using the tilt of the device, like the dice in MachDice.

    So building on what Allen said, the ‘up’ and ‘down’ icons would set whether the user’s touches pull parts of the image out or push them in. I guess the eraser tool removes depth information to reset the height to neutral wherever the user draws. Not sure about the next icon – perhaps it re-applies height information that you just removed. Whatever it is, it better be important to have because it’s a confusing icon 🙂 Presumably top-right is for settings (even though they should be in the Settings.app) 🙂

    And the slider – perhaps it adjusts the range of the adjustments dynamically – i.e. the strength of the 3D effect. Or maybe it is like a brush-size tool. (I.e. set to far left for small, precise adjustments or far right to push and pull the whole image back and forth.)

    Please tell us if we’re on the right track.

  3. Mach Says:

    Wow, you guys are good.

    Yeah, it’s pretty much what you’re both saying. But the erase button is to modify the opacity. There are going to be two layers available: foreground and background. You can erase a little of the foreground to see the background. You’ll also be able to un-erase to restore the image.

    The slider is used to adjust the size of the brush that you’re using for either opacity or depth modification. Also, I forgot that I had the fuzzy circle on the bottom left. It was going to be to switch between hard and soft edge brushes, but I think I’m just going with one brush for simplicity. The last button on the bottom right is to full-screen the hologram and hide the toolbars.

  4. Si Brindley Says:

    Ah – well in that case I wouldn’t put buttons at either end of a slider. I thought they were icons to do with the slider.

    Sounds like a fun app though! I’d be happy to test it for you on my dev iPhone (which is using 3.0 beta 4).