Category: Apple Developer News

Like the groundbreaking women it spotlights, the Rebel Girls app has a remarkable story.

It began a mere six years ago with a book called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Written and art-directed by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, the premise was simple: amplify the stories of history’s most influential women.

The result? Not so much an amplification as a worldwide shockwave. Good Night Stories quickly became one of the most successful publishing campaigns in Kickstarter history and Favilli and Cavallo soon found themselves with an entire Rebel Girls franchise. To date, the brand has sold more than 8 million books, been translated into nearly 50 languages, and seen more than 18 million downloads of its podcast. And the Rebel Girls app, launched just over a year ago, recently won an Apple Design Award for Social Impact.

“We’re creating an omnichannel for girls,” says Jes Wolfe, CEO of Rebel Girls since April 2020. “The app takes the best of our books, podcasts, and audio stories and puts them into a flagship destination.”

The Rebel Girls app uses immersive audio experiences, gorgeous art, and clever interactive elements to spotlight its historic heroines. The women span cultures and centuries: You can get inspired by the careers of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amanda Gorman, and Mae Jemison; explore the creativity of Frida Kahlo, Taylor Swift, and Joan Jett; learn about athletes like Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, and Chloe Kim; dive into historical icons like the pharaoh Hatshepsut, the pirate Grace O’Malley, and the Egyptian astronomer Hypatia; and much more. Each story is accompanied by immersive soundscapes and original illustrations from female and non-binary artists.

Rebel Girls also deepens the stories of its paperbound cousins: While book blurbs are around 300 words, a podcast or audio version can number closer to 2,000. “Everything we do needs to be in support of storytelling,” Wolfe says. “We don’t need a whole lot more, because the stories are so rich and empowering.”

Wolfe’s current focus is the new book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Inspiring Young Changemakers, the fifth title in the Good Night Stories series and one that focuses on women under 30. “It’s the first time we’ve done something 100 percent contemporary,” says Wolfe. Arriving Oct. 4 and featuring a foreword by Bindi Irwin, it spotlights such modern luminaries as Greta Thunberg, Bethany Hamilton, Zendaya, and the Linda Lindas. Those stories and others may well cross over to the podcast and app as well. But regardless of where it appears, that story is always the cornerstone.

‘This is really an audio experience’

The Rebel Girls app started out as something very different: hardware. “The initial idea was a speaker with a projector attached to it that would go on a girl’s bedside table,” says Wolfe. “The plan was to showcase the stories on the wall or ceiling.”

But the team had little experience with hardware, and wanted to move faster than the plan allowed. “The thought became, ‘How can we do audio theater?’” says Wolfe. “The app came from that. And Ter’s job was to adapt the artwork.”

Ter is Terenig Topjian, art director and UI/UX lead for the Rebel Girls app. He’s been with the project since Day 1, art-directing illustrations and backgrounds and aligning the app’s design with the well-established Rebel Girls aesthetic and purpose. “The design is essentially a container for the stories,” says Topjian. “[It] should be beautiful and memorable, but it shouldn’t be flashy. This is really an audio experience.”

The thought became, “How can we do audio theater?’

Jes Wolfe, Rebel Girls CEO

At the time, it was also a very relaxing audio experience. The earliest versions of the app — then titled Rebel Girls Dream On — focused on sleep stories. “That’s part of why you see such toned-down colors and an uncluttered look,” says Topjian. But with time and testing, the team found that kids and parents were listening not just at nighttime but on the way to school, while cleaning up their rooms, or just hanging out. As the use cases expanded, the app became simply Rebel Girls.

While the app’s look and feel might have been quiet, its development pace was anything but. The team typed its first lines of Swift code in early January 2021; just five months later, Rebel Girls soft-launched on the App Store.

“The reason we went from zero code to being quietly live five months later was to get actual data of people using the app,” says Wolfe.

Those early months involved a near-constant flow of prototyping. The team partnered with 80 families who supplied timely feedback on story content, wireframes, and even the color palette. “I remember testing out this one color and asking for the kids’ thoughts, and so many were like, ‘No no no, the book is this color,’ and it’s of course that bold dark,” says Wolfe. “The families helped with everything.”

‘It’s not really a kids’ design’

When it came to visual design, the original Good Night Stories provided much of the inspiration for the app’s interface, typography, and more. “It’s a dreamy style — pastel colors, imaginative illustrations — that’s at the core of the Rebel Girls branding,” says Topjian. “But while it’s dreamy in the literal sense, it’s also metaphorical: We want it to feel aspirational, to convey dreams and confidence.”

To that end, Topjian and team adopted a running strategy for the work. “We treated each piece of artwork like a little movie poster,” says Topjian. Framing it that way helped the team communicate a piece’s mood while providing a chance to integrate little details about the subject — “just as a great movie poster does,” he says.

The people who create the artwork should be as diverse as the subjects we profile.

Jes Wolfe, Rebel Girls CEO

A typical Rebel Girls story begins with the company’s in-house creative teams, who select subjects and match them with a writer, illustrator, and producer. At any given time, there are a half dozen or so stories in the works; two new ones appear in the app every week.

That creative team is diverse by design. “We pride ourselves on creating a platform for a plurality of voices,” says Wolfe. “Representative storytelling — having this huge stable of illustrators, writers, editors, narrators, and producers — is in our DNA.” To date, Rebel Girls has worked with more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries; their Good Night Stories book 100 Real-Life Tales of Black Girl Magic was illustrated entirely by Black artists, while 100 Inspiring Young Changemakers was drawn by artists under 30. “The people who create the artwork should be just as diverse as the subjects we profile,” says Wolfe.

Each story features interactive elements and Easter eggs to enhance the narrative. The artwork for indigenous rights activist and clean water advocate Autumn Peltier integrates colorful waves; illustrations for designer Isabella Springmuhl Tejada are based on her own clothing and work. “For [meterological scientist and entrepreneur] Paige Brown’s illustration, we created a patterned skyscape full of the balloons that carried her experiments,” says Topjian. “This piece was also a sleep story, so we created an illustration with darker tones and a beautiful night sky.”

The interface feels almost tactile — all the buttons and icons are hand-drawn — and is geared mostly toward the primary audience of 6- to 12-year-olds. But Wolfe says 60 percent of Rebel Girls books and 70 percent of their podcasts are experienced together. “We design everything to be enjoyed by parent and child,” says Wolfe. “That’s why it’s not really a kids’ design.”

Establishing that balance — the sense of being a kids’ app that doesn’t entirely feel like a kids’ app — is part of what drew Topjian to the job in the first place. “We think of it as an elevated kids’ app,” Topjian says. “It’s sketchy but it doesn’t feel scribbled. As a designer, I really appreciated how they treated the child as a person who’s growing.”

‘Like a live demo’

As you might expect from such a young app, Rebel Girls is a work in progress. “We’re learning and trying and experimenting,” says Wolfe. “It’s kind of like a live demo.”

Currently, the team is experimenting with more interactive content like polls, quizzes, and solicitations for reader submissions — like art for a soundscape on a bird sanctuary. The app is also leaning into shorter, snackable stories that clock in around five minutes. And Rebel Girls’ new paper book will feature QR codes that link to the audio version of a subject’s story in the app.

Wolfe is certainly pleased about the attention the app has received in such a short time from young girls and families, but she says her most surprising feedback came from a demographic she wasn’t expecting. “We get emails quite frequently from 14-year-olds and 19-year-olds who say, ‘Look, we may be too old for this, we’re not your target audience, but we love these stories so much. They’re just like a constant source of inspiration in our lives.’ That’s pretty great.”

Learn more about Rebel Girls

Download Rebel Girls from the App Store

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Explore more of the 2022 Behind the Design series

Discover how you can build Live Activities for your apps using the new ActivityKit framework, now available in iOS 16.1 beta and Xcode 14.1 beta. Live Activities help people keep track of your app’s content with real-time updates. Your app’s Live Activities display on the Lock Screen and in Dynamic Island — a new design that introduces an intuitive, delightful way to experience iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Live Activities and ActivityKit will be included in iOS 16.1, available later this year. Once the iOS 16.1 Release Candidate is available, you’ll be able to submit apps with Live Activities to the App Store.

View ActivityKit documentation

The beta versions of Xcode 14.1, iOS 16.1, iPadOS 16.1, tvOS 16.1, and watchOS 9.1 are now available. Get your apps ready by confirming they work as expected on these releases. And to take advantage of the advancements in the latest SDKs, make sure to build and test with Xcode 14.1 beta.

To check if a known issue from a previous beta release has been resolved or if there’s a workaround, review the latest release notes. Please let us know if you encounter an issue or have other feedback. We value your feedback, as it helps us address issues, refine features, and update documentation.

View downloads and release notes

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WeatherKit brings valuable weather information to your apps and services through a wide range of data that can help people stay up to date, safe, and prepared. It’s easy to use WeatherKit in your apps for iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9 with a platform-specific Swift API, and on any other platform with a REST API. Up to 500,000 API calls per month are included with Apple Developer Program membership. And now, Account Holders can subscribe for more calls in the Apple Developer app.

Get started with WeatherKit

The murder mystery game Overboard! is a whodunit with a killer twist: You done it… and now you have to get away with it.

In Overboard!, you play not as the detective but the murderer most foul — Veronica Villensey, a fading 1930s starlet who’s tossed her husband off a cruise ship. Now, you have just eight in-game hours to pin the crime on somebody else. Chat with unsuspecting (and suspecting) shipmates, eliminate problematic evidence, blackmail a spy, seduce a potential ally, show up to breakfast on time, cheat at a card game, visit a chapel (awkward), and lie — to everyone, basically all the time. (Did we mention the game won its 2022 Apple Design Award for “Delight and Fun”?)

The upside-down narrative noir mystery is full of vintage style, stabs of dark humor, and a proper cast of murder-novel players. You might speak with the fetching dame in the Lauren Bacall hat, the dashing ship commander, the crusty old woman with many axes to grind, and more. Made in just 100 pandemic days, it’s also a relatively breezy game that you can play in about 20 minutes — and then promptly replay to properly discover all of its multiple storylines and endings.

“We looked around and thought, ‘How has no one done Agatha Christie yet?’” says Jon Ingold, co-founder of game studio Inkle and the game’s author. But the magic is how Overboard! takes on Christie from the other side — while the Death on the Nile-inspired chess pieces seem familiar, the construct certainly isn’t. “I definitely had the most fun job here,” he says.

The game’s development came as a surprise — even to the studio itself. Inkle’s acclaimed portfolio includes titles like Sorcery!, Heaven’s Vault, and Jules Verne adventure 80 Days, and Ingold and studio co-founder Joe Humfrey had been heads down on their next release: a game set in the Scottish highlands. In December 2020, however, Ingold turned up with an idea about a golden-age throwback mystery — a palate-cleansing side hustle that could be hammered out quickly.

“When you’re working on a big project, you’re always dying to work on something smaller,” says Humfrey. “So we thought, let’s just do a one-month game jam! It’s not like it’ll destroy the other project! It ended up taking three months instead of one, but the attitude was refreshing. You don’t labor over your decisions, and you’re ruthless about coming up with elegant design.”

For Ingold, that speed became a delightful mechanic in of itself. “We had this bizarre constraint of trying to go as fast as we could,” laughs Ingold. “We kept saying, ‘This isn’t even what we’re supposed to be doing right now! We can’t let this get out of the box!’” Luckily, they had a studio full of tools that gave them a big head start.

Writing with Ink

Twelve years ago, Humfrey and Ingold left company jobs to launch their own game studio — and became accidental inventors in the process. “Inkle is a bit unusual in that we have a narrative engine that we built for ourselves,” Ingold says.

That proprietary engine, Ink, is essentially a word processor that lets Ingold and the Inkle team write a branching narrative story straight through — “like a film script,” Ingold says — before going back to flesh it out, expand the story, and sprinkle in all the choices, branches, and detours. “It’s like Markdown for interactive fiction,” says Humfrey.

They wanted to create a tool that prioritized words rather than structure. “Most branching story editors are presented as flowcharts,” says Ingold. “But the truth about flowcharts is that they make things seem more complicated than they actually are; they’re spread out all over the page.”

Ink, by contrast, scrolls like a traditional document. “When you’re writing a scene with choices, you have a beginning, middle, and maybe multiple ends. But they’re all going in one direction,” says Ingold. As a lightweight markup language, Ink uses symbols to indicate elements: an asterisk is a choice, a → shifts to another part of the story. “You can essentially write a linear script, then go back through and say, ‘OK, I’m gonna pull this out,’ or ‘I’m gonna branch this bit,’ or ‘I’m gonna make this a long sidetrack that eventually joins back up.’” Bonus: Changing the script is a matter of copy-and-pasting, not rejiggering an entire flowchart. If this sounds interesting, you can check it out yourself: Ink has been open-sourced for the past five years, where Humfrey notes that “hundreds” of games have put it to good use.

(Ink is) like Markdown for interactive fiction.

Joe Humfrey, Inkle co-founder

With Ink, Ingold could focus on the 75,000-word script and its pacing. “Good interactive scenes aren’t good because they have a funky structure. They’re good because they’re well-written,” he says. “The most important thing is allowing the human at the keyboard to get on with [the game].”

In just about three weeks, Ingold had knocked out a “minimum viable story” on Ink before a single line of Overboard! code was written. “I basically scribbled the opening scene out as is — Ink works really well as a notepad,” he says. “But that scene ends when the steward knocks on the door, and you have to ask yourself: Are you going to lie? It’s such a great first decision, and it leads to, OK, if you lie, what’s the consequence of that?” He smiles at the memory. “Naturally, that makes you want to write the next scene.”

‘As little development as possible’

With the game-jam timeline marching on — “so fast that we barely had time to think about whether this was a good or bad idea,” laughs Humfrey — the other members of the Overboard! team began to think about populating their boat.

By late January, the team had a rough prototype ready to go. “It was very unpolished,” says Humfrey. “It wasn’t even a minimum viable product. But you could play it through, and because the core concept was so simple, we could spend loads of time polishing it.”

While historically a jack-of-all-trades for Inkle games, Humfrey served strictly as art director for Overboard!, while Tom Kail handled the UI and artist Anastasia Wyatt drew up the cast of shady shipmates. To kick off art direction, Humfrey went back to Inkle’s rich catalog. “The aim was to build it like a sequel to 80 Days,” says Humfrey. “Of course, it diverged and had its own unique UI requirements. But the technology we’d developed internally was already set up for a project like this,” he says.

In addition to the 80 Days skeleton, the team was able to repurpose existing Inkle systems for testing, gathering feedback, and creating animations; Ink even plugs right into Unity. “That’s one of the reasons we could do this in 100 days,” says Humfrey.

People would say, ‘I wonder what happens if I take this object and show it to that person?’ and I’d be like, ‘Yeah! Good question!’

Jon Ingold, Inkle co-founder and *Overboard!* writer

Once the game was technically operational, playtesting started remarkably early, when the script was only about 30% finalized. “It was like pouring water into a bucket to find the cracks,” Ingold says. “Everything has to make sense. People would say, ‘I wonder what happens if I take this object and show it to that person?’ and I’d be like, ‘Yeah! Good question!’”

Even Ink did its part to help test and polish gameplay. Ingold added a feature that automatically speed-ran the game in Ink to explore the varying branches, so plot holes could be plugged before they even made it into the Unity build. In the final version, the software even keeps track of not only what you know (for instance, that you tossed a diamond earring out of a porthole), but what the other characters know too (for instance, that you’re acting real squirrelly about when you were up on the deck). It’ll also show you the choices you made before, in case you maybe wanna steal those sleeping pills this time around.

“The replayablity mechanic is one of the features we’re most proud of,” says Humfrey. “It’s so easy for a narrative game to feel repetitive, like you’re seeing the same thing multiple times.” To get around it, he looked to films like Groundhog Day, the 1993 comedy about a guy doomed to relive the same day over and over. “That movie cut things down really tightly, so every time they did a time loop you saw just enough context to understand where you were in the loop. I think we managed to make that work quite well.”

The speedy timeline meant the script didn’t require much editing, since anything extraneous never made it there in the first place. Instead, revisions involved adding dialogue, sprinkling in a few zingers, or testing the boundaries of the game’s tone. (A slapsticky scene in which Veronica finds out a higher power is disappointed with her life choices stayed in; a scene where she attacks someone with a cross did not.)

But sometimes, Ingold just wanted to fit in a scene he liked. “And that’s just sheer joy, because all you’re doing is saying, ‘I wish there was a scene where I could break into the old lady’s room, so I’ll slot that in here.” The characters also lent themselves to wild interactions. “Everybody clashes on the boat,” Ingold says. “Veronica wants everyone to be in awe of her, but the old lady isn’t bothered by her at all. It’s essentially a comedy.”

Humfrey puts it another way. “The thing that Jon’s managed to crack is that Overboard! doesn’t take itself too seriously,” he says.

‘That’s the sort of person she is’

The job of bringing those clashing characters to screen fell to artist and designer Anastasia Wyatt, who, from her home office in Manchester, raced to bring the Overboard! cast to life; in fact, what you’re playing on your device is probably pretty close to what she initially dreamed up. “In a lot of cases, I went with the first design that came into my head,” says Wyatt.

For those designs, Wyatt trawled into the rich potential of the game’s vintage setting, pulling designs from 1930s fashion, magazines, and even sewing pattern books to outfit background players like the irritatingly effective detective Subedar-Major Singh, the curiously sad Clarissa Turpentine, and Veronica (who required extra care since she essentially never leaves the screen). “I saw a picture of this particular hat and the way it sat on a woman’s head,” Wyatt says, “and I could visualize the whole character from that one piece of clothing.”

For the backgrounds, Wyatt found herself drawn to the art deco style of vintage British railway posters, all promising exotic globe-trotting adventure. “They were all advertising — ‘Visit Aberystwyth!’ — but they had this great palette of bright, hyper-cheery colors,” says Wyatt.

Wyatt and the design team took pains to make it an inspiration, rather than full recreation; Humfrey also brought in a bit of the comic book pop-art style from the ‘50s (all bold colors and slant-edged panels) to add a bit of playfulness to the dark surroundings. “We tried to push the boundaries, but not so much that it don’t look like the ‘30s anymore,” she says. “You have to find that balance between cartoonifying people and keeping them recognizable in real life.”

Wyatt also worked in a few Easter eggs — like Veronica’s stylish hat, which casts an exaggerated shadow. “It’s definitely what you’d see in a character you can’t trust,” says Wyatt (even if, as the game goes on, you learn more about the character’s backstory). Wyatt also draped Lady Honoria Armstrong’s shoulders in an enormous fox fur, a grotesque touch of overamplified high society that’s intentionally out of place. “Obviously you wouldn’t wear a big fur coat with a whole dead fox around your neck in the summer,” Wyatt laughs, “but that’s the sort of person she is.”

‘You should always trade up’

Overboard! is designed for maximum replayability; even if you get away with murder the first time, there’s plenty of story left to unpack. “With any of our games, you might only see 20% of the material on the first playthrough,” says Humfrey. You can replay to score insurance money, check off a list of in-game objectives, or discover hidden storylines. According to the internet, some players have even been known to play through to try and eradicate everyone on the ship.

All of that replayability, the sense that the mystery is yours to do with as you please, is the best possible outcome for such a mystery, says Ingold. Overboard! is done; no updates or additional content are planned, though Humfrey admits to thinking about a sequel. If it happens, Ingold is on board. “As a writer, you should always trade up,” he says. “Is Overboard! what I started off with? No, it’s a version that’s been traded up and up and up.”

Learn more about Overboard!

Download Overboard! from the App Store

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Explore more of the 2022 Behind the Design series

Now that you’ve watched the Apple Event, get ready for the release of iOS 16, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9. Learn how you can submit apps for each platform and explore how you can support the latest software features in your apps and games.

Submit your apps

Get ready for iOS 16, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9

Apple Developer Documentation

August 30, 2022

Xcode Cloud, the continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode, accelerates the development and delivery of high-quality apps. Get started by configuring a workflow in Xcode and receive 25 compute hours per month at no cost until the end of 2023. And now, Account Holders can subscribe for more compute hours in the Apple Developer app.

Get started with Xcode Cloud

Build, test, and distribute great apps using Apple’s continuous integration and delivery service, Xcode Cloud. This toolkit provides you with all the information you need to manage and optimize your workflow. Learn how to set up your first workflow, develop a workflow strategy — Xcode Cloud supports both solo developers and large teams — and build your test suite to help you deliver great apps.

Meet Continuous Integration and Delivery with Xcode Cloud

Everything you need to know to begin.

About continuous integration and delivery with Xcode Cloud

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Get started

Explore the basics of Xcode Cloud and set up your first workflow.

Meet Xcode Cloud

Get to know Xcode Cloud, Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for building apps and frameworks for all Apple platforms. Find out how Xcode Cloud can improve both the productivity of your team and the quality of your products. We’ll show you how to start your…

Explore Xcode Cloud workflows

Learn how Xcode Cloud workflows can help you and your team automate building, analyzing, testing, archiving, and distributing your apps and frameworks. They are flexible, extensible, and can be configured around your team’s development and distribution process. Find out the basics of Xcode Cloud…

Configuring your first Xcode Cloud workflow

Manage your workflows

Learn the ins and outs of workflow strategy and configuration.

Deep dive into Xcode Cloud for teams

Learn how you can use Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service with development teams of any size to help you deliver high-quality apps. We’ll show you how to integrate Xcode Cloud into your team’s existing app development process and efficiently use Xcode Cloud…

Xcode Cloud workflow reference

Developing a workflow strategy for Xcode Cloud

Configuring Xcode Cloud for your team

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Get the most out of Xcode Cloud

Discover how you can get the most out of Xcode Cloud, Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service. We’ll take you through an overview of Xcode Cloud and how it connects with Xcode and App Store Connect. We’ll also explore the Xcode Cloud Usage Dashboard in App Store…

Customize your advanced Xcode Cloud workflows

Xcode Cloud integrates with Apple Developer tools and services, all major source control management services, and even social collaboration tools like Slack. If your development process relies on additional tools and external services, however, you can fine-tune your workflows and the behavior of…

Author fast and reliable tests for Xcode Cloud

Discover how you can create effective testing plans for Xcode Cloud, Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery service. We’ll show you how testing can be an essential tool to consistently verify your code works correctly. Learn how you can author fast, reliable, and efficient tests…

Few things are more emotionally gratifying than checking something off a to-do list (well, for some of us, anyway).

But if that sort of thing pleases you currently, wait until you get a load of the (Not Boring) Habits approach. The app’s checkbox is no mere tappable square — it’s an interactive event replete with explosive 3D animations, custom sounds, and playful haptics, all designed to make you feel less like you marked off a task and more like you landed on the moon.

“We went all out,” says Andy Allen, the app’s developer. “There was a lot of room to wrap something special around that box.”

Magically transforming everyday events into bold, brash experiences is the driving philosophy around the (Not Boring) suite of apps from Andy Works, the studio founded by Allen and Mark Dawson. Like its siblings Weather, Calculator, and Timer, (Not Boring) Habits wildly amplifies a pretty mild-mannered category, tearing down the traditional approach in favor of eye-popping aesthetics, zingy haptics, spiffy 3D animations, and plenty of the delight and fun that nabbed the app its 2022 Apple Design Award.

“It’s about adding something extra,” says Allen. “You can write a to-do list on a piece of paper and it works just the same, right?” If strict practicality is your goal, the app ecosystem is swimming in weather apps and habit trackers, and Allen is the first to admit that (Not Boring) apps aren’t for everyone. “But,” he says with a smile, ”they’re definitely really for some people.”

‘A joyful and maybe surprising ritual’

In the summer of 1970, the painter John Baldessari, who’d been working for nearly two decades, decided he’d had quite enough. He collected all the paintings he’d made between May 1953 and March 1966 that were in his possession, broke them into pieces, brought them to a San Diego mortuary, and lit them all on fire. One year later, he created a lithograph called I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, consisting entirely of that single phrase, written over and over like he’d gotten in trouble with the teacher.

Allen was taken with the blaze of glory — particularly the notion of a hard break with the past. He’d studied filmmaking and worked for years as an animator, but gradually found himself drawn more to the “personal connections” possible with apps — especially in the nascent age of mobile development. One of his first apps was the hit drawing experience Paper, which won he and his FiftyThree studio an Apple Design Award in 2012.

“There was such a spirit of experimentation back then,” Allen says. “Today, and often for the right reasons, patterns and systems have been built up, and it’s certainly easier to build now. But what if we built software that embodied some of those experimental values, that tried to differentiate not purely on functionality but also design? Every day you look at the weather, or a clock, or a list of stuff to do. Why not make that a joyful — and maybe surprising — ritual?”

This philosophy wasn’t just a design approach; it was a function of the company’s size. “There’s only two of us,” Dawson says. “Big teams will always have more features than we do — we just can’t compete there. But design is difficult to copy. You can have your own style. You can make it beautiful. And that’s something we can do while still having an opinionated feature set.”

Big teams will always have more features than we do — we just can’t compete there. But design is difficult to copy.

Mark Dawson, Andy Works co-founder

To create Habits, they started by rebranding the habit tracker. “We consider it a habit builder,” says Allen. “We try to think about it as loving the journey of creating a new habit.”

They cast that journey as an actual, well — journey — with its roots in the mythic hero quest, taking someone through dark forests and over looming mountains en route to a preordained destiny. Habits is predicated on research that indicates it takes 66 days to build a new habit; in certain ways, it’s a video game with 66 levels.

“It’s always felt a little weird that games are seen as separate in the product design world,” Allen says. “You’ll hear people referencing movies or architecture, but it’s like, ‘Well, what about this incredibly rich domain of creativity that’s super-adjacent to what we’re doing?’ Why does work have to be over here and fun over there?”

Besides, what’s a really good way to convince someone to do a job? Turn it into a game. “My daughter and I were playing Wilmot’s Warehouse, where you’re literally organizing things in a warehouse,” Allen laughs. “But it’s a game! It has a goal and challenges you! Lots of fun, basic principles can be applied to utility apps in the very same way, but for whatever reason, I just haven’t seen it. A big thing with (Not Boring) was breaking down the barrier between apps, utilities, and games.”

‘Fairly off-the-shelf’

(Not Boring) Habits required the nifty zing of its brand, but it also needed to be a lightweight, quick-launching, scannable daily utility app. And the road to get there was about as traditional as it gets.

The app’s 3D animations are authored in the open-source modeling tool Blender, built in SceneKit — which Allen chose for its easy integration with Apple tools — and tied together with UIKit and SwiftUI views. “Most of [our] standard controls are fairly off-the-shelf, which makes things very simple and predictable,” says Allen. “We didn’t have to rethink how a button or a popover works. And SceneKit’s interfaces with UIKit and standard UI controls make it all feel more seamless, like one environment,” he says.

Part of Allen’s goal with building Habits was proving that such a visual experience could be built with the basics. “We chose [Blender] because we wanted to prove out a possible pipeline that didn’t require people to spend thousands of dollars on 3D software and then spend months trying to figure out how it worked,” Allen says. “We wanted to should how you could build custom, rich experiences with off-the-shelf pieces. The pipeline didn’t really exist; we had to piece it together. But once we got it working, things rolled fairly quickly.” He’s not kidding: (Not Boring) Habits was developed in all of two months.

This brings us back to the checkbox. The gonzo version of the box in the app is result of a complex, iterative design strategy that went like this: Add stuff, keep adding stuff, and follow with the inclusion of — you guessed it — yet more stuff. Here again, Allen drew from the world of gaming.

“Game designers are amazing at taking very simple inputs — like a one-button press — and turning into something much bigger,” says Allen. “The same button can feel like you’re tiptoeing around or smashing something with a sledgehammer. That was our idea: How do we take principles and techniques from games — the haptics and sounds and particle animations — and apply them to something as basic as a checkbox?”

In contrast with his history (“There was some real tension there with my minimalist graphic design background,” he laughs), the checkbox was an exercise in more. In fact, the more Allen added, the more he felt closer to his desired feeling. “Experiences on our phones are still trapped behind a screen,” he says, ”so you have to put in what’s taken away, and so you have to intentionally layer and layer and push and push.“

For instance, the Habits checkbox can’t merely be ticked; you have to intentionally press on the screen for longer than you might think to trigger the animation. “It’s a very big, gross interaction,” he says. “But after prototyping, we found we had to make it much more intentional; we needed feedback that told you you needed to keep holding.” Then came the iterations, sounds, and custom haptics to make it feel like more of an explosion. “There were thousands of iterations,” he laughs. “I’d do something and think, ‘OK, this is way over the top and I’m gonna do it anyway.’ And then I put it in and it’s like, ‘You know, it’s not that bad!’”

I don’t want to live in a perfectly white-walled museum all the time. I want to live where there’s richness and texture and fun.

Andy Allen, Andy Works co-founder

The language of gaming gave him much more room to play. “There’s an understanding of how much feedback you should get from a game, and honestly, the bar is pretty high. We added maybe six or seven things in the checkbox, but most games probably have two or three times that for any one interaction.” In other words, sometimes you have to get loud. “Look, minimalism is a fun place to visit for me, but it’s not somewhere I want to live,” he laughs. “I love visiting an art gallery. But I don’t want to live in a perfectly white-walled museum all the time. I want to live where there’s richness and texture and fun.”

Pushing ‘the language of product design’

As the saying goes, (Not Boring) is more than an app; it’s a lifestyle. “It’s tricky sometimes to communicate that you’re trying to sell someone on design,” says Dawson. “A lot of people might say, ‘Oh I don’t want to pay for that.’ But maybe it gives you new experiences — or maybe you just want to open your app and feel good.”

In the short term, Allen and Dawson are hoping for an elevated experience; in the long term, they wouldn’t mind a wholesale design revolution. “Our primary goal is to inspire other app creators to be more adventurous, to push the language of product design,” says Allen. “There’s been a coalescence over the last few years about what product should look like, and some of that is for the better, sure. But I believe we need people who want to explore new territory and find new patterns. There’s so much space with apps to connect with people in their daily lives; I’d love to see a world where we’re all immersed in amazing, interesting ideas.”

Learn more about (Not Boring) Habits

Download (Not Boring) Habits from the App Store

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

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August 26, 2022

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