Playing around with AppMachine

For my blog post this week, I decided to chronicle my adventure trying out AppMachine (while simultaneously creating a supporting text for my in class presentation tomorrow).

I picked AppMachine since the heading Mobile Storytelling Tools was the most attractive to me out of the 'Tools' section and AppMachine was the first tool listed.

Traveling to the AppMachine website, at first glance is seems that the website will be easy to manage. With colorful squared and step by step boxes to fill in, and even a little display of a phone on the right hand side of the screen, it seems that app making will be easier than I thought.

There are even options to upload personal images to your app (I thought "Oh, what a fun way to personalize the app!).

Well. Using AppMachine was, for me, a frustrating experience in creating a mess--at first.

The main issue was: I don't know what I'm doing and the AppMachine interface is not as easy as it first seems. There are almost too many selections that you can make. Without a very clear idea of the end product, you're randomly selecting options you think will end up well together.

Here are some images from within the app:

As you can see, my personal "heading" photos are completely awkward against the background "skin" I selected from AppMachines library. The text placement and color scheme could be improved to make the photo vs. skin separation seem less jarring.

However, overall, I believe that going in with a clear idea of what you want, insofar as text, color scheme, menus and web links are concerned, and some extra time for experimentation, AppMachine would work to create an enhanced ebook app hybrid.

-Jones