Idle Time

Choose any—or, preferably, none:

• Make custom buttons, but don’t hire a professional designer to design them. Draw your UI in your pirated copy of Photoshop and make the best buttons you, fellow non-graphically-superpowered programmer, can manage, which look like you downloaded them from GeoCities in 1995 or got them out of a “1001 Buttons!” book from the same year.
• Make custom UI controls (especially buttons) simply because you can.
• Fill your App Store page’s “screenshots” section with images that are not purely screenshots. Showing an iPhone 4 with your app on it is a minus. Showing an older iPhone is another minus. Putting in your own inane blather marketing copy with your paint program’s text tool is a minus. Putting the iPhone and/or text on any kind of background is a minus. Any image that does not show the app at all is 500 minuses.
• Show screenshots, but only of some of the app. Leave me wondering whether your app has the feature or UI pattern I’m looking for. (If your app is free, I’ll try it and find out. If it’s not, I won’t.)
• Custom backgrounds without (good) custom UI. Extra debit if your background is plain white.
• Abbr btn nms.

How to keep me actually interested and maybe even get me to buy your app:

• If you make custom UI, make it awesome. Make a truly original UI that would belong on the cover of Macworld. Make it a custom UI with a purpose that guides and justifies the customizations. (Beware the difference between “purpose” and “theme”.) Otherwise, stick to plain Cocoa Touch controls wherever possible. Functional beats ugly.
• If you go functional, follow the HIG. Either way, keep things clean and well-organized. Don’t force too much into a single screen. If you “have to” pack multiple things on a line, that’s too much. If you “have to” abbreviate words, that’s too much. Consider cutting features; simplicity is a virtue. If you need to break things out into other views, do it.
• The screenshots section is for screenshots only. If you need to indicate a gesture, composite in a finger and an arrow, and don’t do that in more than one screenshot. No added text. Ever.

Don’t miss the comments. I’m sure some of you have some other don’ts to suggest that I forgot.

The best works of fiction all have in common a certain feeling.

It comes at the end. You’ve finished it. There is no more; you know this, and it hurts you, because you want more, you want the enjoyment you’ve just had to continue forever, and yet you know that if there were always more, if it ran forever, eventually it would get boring, so it is good that is over, and yet it hurts.

Portal 2—which is great, all the way through—leaves you with that feeling. The ending is great, the best ending I’ve ever seen in a video game, and it hurts.

You should play it.

Play the first one first, and then play the second. And then you should probably play them both again—I know there’s some stuff I’ll view differently when I play Portal 2 the second time.

The only thing it left me wanting was a soundtrack album. I only bought the one song (you know the one) from the Orange Box soundtrack, but I would happily buy the whole soundtrack to this game. The music is as wonderful as the game it accompanies. I hope, someday, preferably someday soon, I can go to the iTunes Store or Amazon MP3 and buy it.

Valve and everybody else involved in making this game (and the original): You rock.

EDIT 2011-06-12: Just found this phenomenon on TVTropes. (To be clear, they had it first.)