Frequently Asked Questions (ReNext 1.4.2)

A: In the last 2 years, I have written 3 books. I used Ulysses to complete it on my iPhone, which made a lot of software unable to help me realize the function of memory. My head always contains all the complete frameworks, levels, and details of a book, because I need to immediately locate where I need to change and add. So I need to know what kind of book I want to write, what I want to write next, and what I have written. We often rarely encounter such huge memory projects in our lives, and ReNext, which is capable of similar complex work, can achieve goal management more easily.

A: The philosophy of design of ReNext is love and nature. The design concepts of ReNext are Balance, Humanity, Optimal visual effect ratio, Global Unification, Elegant, extreme, and high efficiency. The design style of ReNext is minimalist. The main design elements of ReNext are color, font, and space.
Love: To make the user experience better for people with different hand sizes, both children and adults, we broke the existing top-down visual framework. 


Nature is simplest: elaborately use the color and space of natural elements as nature, no more need for visual aid for the frame or line, but the joy of exploring. You learn about the natural world by constantly touching, tapping and observing it, a process that gives you a better understanding of its fascination and the joy of growing and reaping the rewards. So we give you the choice, and some more thoughtful hidden features are waiting for you to explore. 



Balanced: traditional and modern, user inertia and progress, visual inertia and fresh air, functional inertia and science, even different design concepts. Because a habit is the most accessible and efficient way to effectively reduce the cost of learning, and the innovations made on this basis are also the most likely to have an overlapping effect.



Humanity: humans make tools to meet human instincts and needs, not to endure their defects, otherwise they are anti-human. The long full-screen smartphone is out of the control of your thumb. It’s definitely anti-human. So, we are trying to keep interacting in the area of your thumb. So we add a bottom interactive zone and some more hidden thoughtful gestures.



Optimal visual effect ratio: providing better visual design under the premise of realizing the same product functions. The healthy competition between design and function sacrifices neither product function nor industrial design. This is what we insist about an optimal visual effect ratio. The bottom-up UI framework faces a lot of compatibility issues. Functionality that could be achieved with very simple code in the normal top-down UI framework, we had to look for new solutions to implement. For example, the first keyboard popup doesn’t appear in the right place, and to-do groups don’t show up in their entirety, and data-saving crashes. Whenever there was a slight problem, we basically had to find a completely new solution.



Global Unified: we are trying to make sure that each element and each design element follow the same design concept. Insist on a coherent user experience. Because we introduced a brand-new gesture system, which led to the confusion of gesture logic in some interfaces. In order to ensure the most core gestures, we gave up some gestures to ensure a consistent user experience. For example, in order to unify the gesture of sliding down to return, we completely discarded the gesture of swiping to the right to return.



We are pursuing the maximum amount of visual information in the minimum visual unit, and the perfect spatial combination of all visual amounts of information. We integrated the adding and editing of to-do groups into one page, which not only greatly reduces clutter and improves management efficiency, but also improves visual information density.



We are trying to do our best to pursue the perfection of every detail. The background image, for example, is an original made based on the only wallpaper I've seen in a decade that as I've seen it more and more and to love it more and more.



We are insisting simple, clear and natural. No chaos, no interference, no detour. The memory resources of the human brain are limited, reducing non-intuitive memory, thinking levels, interactive steps, and increasing intuitive associations.



I even want to share more about ReNext with you, but I have to control myself.

A: No widget forever. The widget is an ugly and inefficient industrial design element on the iPhone. I have explained in my book and published on Medium.

A: No dark mode forever. I have explained in my book.
Humanity: Humans make tools to meet human instincts and needs, not to endure their defects, otherwise they are anti-human. For example, people are used to living in a colorful world in the sunlight, so please don't tell me how much power-efficiency the dark mode of the OLED screen is, not to mention how anti-human the experience of exploring the unknown world in the dark mode is. Moreover, when displaying pictures with a pure white background, the OLED screen is not more power-efficient than the LCD screen. The problem of power consumption in OLED screen daylight mode is that technology should cater to human nature for improvement, not an excuse for smartphone manufacturers to change users' natural lifestyle through misleading marketing. In this way, innovative solutions to solve problems disappear. The source of human nature comes from the instincts in human/biological genes: survival, reproduction, and passing-time. From this, more specific instinctive needs are derived, such as eating to ensure survival, sexual behavior to promote reproduction, and chatting and playing games to passing-time. Further to the next layer, eating, decomposition, digestion and transformation ensure a perfect energy supply system; foreplay, posture and battlefield promote high-quality sexual behavior; morality, etiquette, rules, etc. promote more efficient passing-time. In the process of human evolution, only by constantly breaking the needs of the previous layer can we achieve self-realization beyond the status quo and promote the huge progress of society. The closer to the instinctive needs, the more the foundation, and the further away from the instinctive needs, the more breakthroughs. One of the two is indispensable. For example, the screen of a smartphone is a basic requirement for information acquisition, while a high-quality screen is an advanced requirement for high-quality information presentation. All the needs derived from instinct correspond to the two opposing modes of satisfaction, superior and inferior. Each way can reach countless levels, and choosing the way to satisfy instincts and needs & the level of this way is human nature, and the key lies in personal choice. Top-level industrial design is to stand firmly on the side of the highest standards of the satisfying mode at the crossroads of almost every choice.

A: 1. Compared to one hand, when using both hands, you need one more hand to overcome gravity and stay in the air;
2. When interacting with one hand, the thumb basically stays on the surface of the iPhone screen or the edge of the iPhone. Usually, the hand in charge of interacting when interacting with both hands will rest away from the iPhone in a natural way before the next interaction, especially when there is a long time between two interacts. This bit will consume energy.
3. There is only one posture holding the iPhone in one hand. But there are two postures for holding the iPhone with both hands: curl up the fingers that are not responsible for the interaction or naturally unfold the fingers that are not responsible for the interaction. Which posture to choose requires a few milliseconds to a few seconds of thinking and decision-making time.
4. The significance of a one-handed interaction lies in its intuitiveness. In the whole process of using our iPhones, picking up and putting down the iPhone is only with one hand, and the process of switching to both hands takes a few seconds. In the process of using iPhones, we do not always maintain the posture of both hands. Every time we switch between one hand and both hands, it will waste a few milliseconds to a few seconds of thinking and decision-making time, not counting the brain power and time wasted when preparing to switch.
5. In real life, we often can only spare one hand to interact with our iPhones, such as carrying goods when shopping, carrying a briefcase at work, holding a cup of coffee, and so on.
This is the advantage of one-handed interaction from concrete world analysis. Of course, users don't need to understand it so deeply. It's our responsibility. The interaction designed for one-handed interaction does not affect the two-handed interaction experience, and the interaction designed for both hands often sacrifices the one-handed interaction experience. For this reason, Apple's iOS has also been optimizing one-handed control, such as the downward-moving search bar, in order to concentrate the operation in the middle and lower parts of the mobile phone that can be covered with one hand. The reason why iOS is not completed in one go is that iOS is huge, the massive user habits, and interaction are too complicated.
So, you can use ReNext with one hand totally to skip the two levels of thinking and decision-making, the process and action of one-handed and two-handed switching, and nonintuitive interruption.

A: Our habitual impression of UX is typesetting from top to bottom, but this habit does not mean that it is more logical or the only answer than the bottom-up arrangement. Just like vertically typeset Japanese books. Moreover, the cost of this habit of silence is low, so it can be easily changed.
Although it is not necessary to design UX completely from the bottom to the top, in order to show another perfect parallel UX, ReNext will perfectly implement the design concept from the bottom to the top, as a standard new UX reference book for those who seek a better user experience.

A: Yes. Such as, there is a much cooler method to add to-do, that's drag the three-dot-bar up. Yes, I know you're excited about it, me too. But there's an unfixable bug. After dragging the Home Indicator to return to the Home Screen of iOS, the gesture of dragging the three-dot-bar up also be activated, but it shouldn't. After seeking lots of methods to fix it, I failed. So I have to give up and change it to click the Next Interact Zone to add to-do.
And for the best user experience for users with hands of varying sizes as the golden ratio of the original iPhone, I opted for a bottom-up layout that no one had tried before.
Due to compatibility, I faced lots of issues that will not show with the top-down layout in Xcode. I created complex zoom-in and zoom-out animations to mask the disorderly movement of some UI elements, and fixed the problem of wrong keyboard location when the TextField is tapped.
For the best one-handed user experience, I had to give up some gestures, such as sliding from the edge of the iPhone to back, which led to the gestures all being realized by one hand. So I faced ineffective gestures when interaction gestures exceeded three.
Thanks to iOS 26, they are solved. Though this required a three-month delay in release. However, it was all worthwhile for the best user experience.
I know you want to hear more. I will keep updating here.

A:
User A:
While I have mixed feelings about the portmanteau "thinfferent" I do understand the homage and on some level can appreciate the motif behind the site's Jobs-esque styled product announcement.
Meanwhile, the actual name you've given for the app "ReNext" seems a lot more intuitive and informative combination of words. Seeing the screenshots alone might give me pause as the bold design choices (or almost a total lack thereof. Keyword being "almost" as it's not actually a "total" lack of UI design -- because I do see what you're doing with color, how you're playing with space, the overall bottom-up orientation that's friendly to finger-focused gesture-driven navigation, etc) seem to go well past the "minimalist" descriptor and sit squarely in the "spartan" range of UI's... but like I said, that was just my initial impression based solely on the screenshots. But the "ReNext" name finally tied it together for me and the idea behind the app actually clicked into place (yes, even more than the thinfferent landing page or the App Store description, all of which seemed a bit too contrived at first glance. What can I say? Sometimes it's the seemingly simple choices that make the strongest impressions, moreso than a Jobs'ian tribute ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
As I'd be more than happy and willing to try out this somewhat risky, highly experimental, gesture-driven, text-based, to-do/PM/GTD app you've clearly put a lot of thought into creating (even if the choices you've made seem almost sparse, they're certainly there... heh, I'm even noticing the choices you made in designing the app's icon right now as I pen this. It almost seems like an inconsequential doodle with no real thought put behind it. Almost. That's how deceptively simple it looks. But I'm guessing that the placement and colors of the quadrants hold some significance behind it, am I right?).
User B:
Loved that you're carrying on David Allen's legacy! As someone who's struggled to master GTD, I'm impressed by your dedication to making it accessible - one-handed typing, here we come!.

A: Email us at hello@thinfferent.com.

A: I'm Shakenal, a Chinese and an independent founder. Nearly nobody. The greatest achievement was writing and publishing three semi-profesional books on Amazon. If you are interested, click the link to find out more about it.
Visit my Amazon Author Page