Stephen Martin

 

Experimenting with UI Patterns, Sync, Disclosures

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of working with @cricketgeek on a Phone app he was building for ShootQ. It's a pretty deep app and pulls in tons of data from the ShootQ web app.

One of the challenges we faced early on had to do with showing "Shoots" that you had synced vs. 'Shoots" that you still had to sync with the web server. As not to go into detail about what a shoot is, I'll refer to it as a project, since it has a subset of items and tasks.

Projects are listed out with disclosure indicators, allowing you to drill down into more specific details about the project. In order to do this, the app needs to sync the project with server and gather the latest data.

Rather than show another date (the creation date is already part of the project), we opted for changing the disclosure icon to a sync icon if the project had not been synced.

Sync
It's just a small indicator of what's to come when you tap a specific project. Sync or view.

This becomes important if you lose your data connection. You'll know which projects don't have the most up-to-date information.

Filed under: indicators iphone ui
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