Hyphen is an eBook reader I've been working on since roughly 2015 (holy shit, it's been 5 years.) I had the idea after Stanza, another eBook reader I used and cherished, was snapped up by Amazon and neglected. Eventually, it stopped working at all. Later it was pulled entirely.
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So I decided to build my own. Fast forward to the present; I'm now working on the 2nd version of the app, which is a total redesign. The idea is to take Hyphen's existing ethos — providing a customizable, enjoyable reading experience for ePubs — and expanding and improving on it.
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At the moment, what that means is providing support for more eBook formats (PDF, CBR/CBZ), but also finding opportunities to strengthen the core reading experience and provide better library management.
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So, backstory out of the way; what's next? The first thing I'd like to start with is the why. Why do I think Hyphen needs to exist? What problem is it solving?
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With pretty much all human solutions and problems you can ask why infinitely; perhaps the most important part then is choosing the right levels of why to examine. If I skip to one of the deeper levels of why (why read? why consume?) the best answer I can imagine is:
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Outside ideas and experiences provide opportunities for our enrichment, growth, and entertainment. They allow us to consider ways of being we otherwise might not have, to seed and water our mental gardens with ideas and perspectives that overtime can form a new, unique self.
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Books, and other mediums like them, are a way for us to collectively work together to navigate and solve Human Problems (why am I here? why are _we_ here? who am I? what does it mean to be good? and: holy shit, I'm going to die one da — wait, is that cat playing a piano?)
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OK, coming back around to this; I think it's way lower level that is necessary, or immediately actionable for building... a reading apphttps://twitter.com/mattxcurtis/status/1196939444277915651 …
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Closer to the surface, one of the problems being solved could be defined as: some people want to read books, but have preferences that make carrying around physical books undesirable; digital books provide certain advantages for them over physical ones
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One solution is an app; our devices provide a convenient means to read as they're almost always with us (and more compact than physical books.)
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But that's still a pretty broad as a "solution" (and really, so is the "problem") How can we break this down into something more concrete? One option is to look at existing human behaviors and figure out what translates to the solution's mold (an "app") and what doesn't
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In the meatspace, there appear to be at least two immediate parts to the ecosystem of reading: the book and the library. The library the container from which books are stored and sourced, and the book (pre-consumption) a medium
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And, of course: you, the reader. There are other players in this ecosystem too, such as the author, the publisher, the marketplace, etc. all with varying proximity and degrees of separation to you depending on your position within the problem domain
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Going back to the library and book, where do these fit in within the mold of an app? How do they translate? Here's some early exploration looking at them a bit more abstractly, as digital agents/interactive objects and their attributespic.twitter.com/NHT7l665xo
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(You might've noticed that the definition of "the reader" there is different than how I've been using it so far. In the photo it refers to what I now call the "reading interface," a distinction necessary to avoid confusion between primary agent (user, reader) and interface)
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Took this a little bit further and tried to put together a more expanded version as a mind map. The here idea was to explore what the digital equivalents of the physical needs/affordances at play might look like
pic.twitter.com/fLV06f1NU1
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I've moved things over to Notion to give me more room to think about and document things. Starting to explore some of the blanks around different parts of the overall experience using my mindmap as a scaffolding; here's an example that looks at how books get into a library:pic.twitter.com/5aAVG12gOO
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More rumination. This time laying out some guiding principles for Hyphen's book interfacespic.twitter.com/j7wBflwjhG
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Alright so I’ve FINALLY regained some momentum after being taken away by other obligations
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I’ve spent the past two weeks (where I could claw out the time, tooth and nail
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So I’ve started exploring some possible user interface directions in the original
@sketch app:pic.twitter.com/FI3okbdfqr
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Easily the best thing about starting with paper is the lack of PRESSURE and friction The second I start fiddling with a mouse and worrying about pixels and color and spacing I slow WAY down It also comes with a built-in annotation tool, which is pretty nice
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