Now Dashboard an elegant iPad app
Focus
iPad native
Responsibilities
Concept, Design, Coding
Timeline
Early 2013
Thoughts
I’ve always been interested in clocks and weather presentations. With multiple iPad 1 devices laying around I decided it was time to develop something for people who had older devices and nothing useful to do with them. What better than to create an elegant, always-on clock.
Design
Now was designed as a 25-foot interface — something to be entirely meaningful both up-close and 25-feet away.
In this design I decided to work on imparting meaningful information as simply and elegantly as possible. With no shadows, blends, or extraneous graphical elements the interface looks at home in any setting. This became more of a dashboard of current information than about weather presentation — though there are hints at a few concepts I have about weather to be found.
Subtle update and condition change animations make it blend in quietly as an always-on clock.
Technology
The most challenging part of Now was finding reliable and realistic weather data. I churned through many external weather data sources and remained unimpressed throughout the project. Due to this I designed the data collection portion of the application as a separate subsystem to the application. It allowed for simple data provider changes and even hot-swapping in certain scenarios.
