When I was in High School, I had a job in the accounting department of a non-profit. This was the mid-eighties, so a spreadsheet was a giant piece of green paper with cells drawn on them. The department had a mainframe and used computers to process invoices, but a lot of accounting work was still done on paper. I helped file that paper.

At some point, they got a couple of PCs and they installed Lotus 123 on them, but no one was really using them. They knew that I was into computers, and so they asked me to transcribe the paper spreadsheets to Lotus 123 as more of a data-entry clerk.

This work was a seed which grew and grew. At some point I discovered SUM and showed it to someone. I learned more about formulas and built spreadsheets that could auto calculate when the underlying numbers changed. You know, spreadsheet stuff.

By the time I left, my spreadsheets made extensive use of macros and more complex formulas.

In a very real sense, those spreadsheets were programs, and learning how to do that alongside with learning how to program made me better at both.

I think that a lot of people that are good at Excel could learn how to write conventional applications if they wanted to. Even if they aren’t currently writing macros, the main ideas of cells, formulas, range processing, grid-layout, and styling map pretty cleanly onto application software concepts.

If you follow a programming tutorial, at the end you will have some working code. You will hopefully have some idea of how it works.

But, you haven’t learned how to make this code. Programming is different from woodworking or playing a guitar in this way, because they require training your hands. Watching and repeating what you see will work to help you learn and improve.

In programming, it’s good to type fast, but most of what is happening when you make new code is in your head, and tutorials don’t train that part.

This is why I think Programming Tutorials Should be Vaguer. Programming is taking a nebulous problem and breaking it down, understanding it, trying to find building blocks, and then building up something that solves the problem.

The final form is concrete, but it is made by going through multiple phases where you took unclear ideas and made them clearer.

We need tutorials that ask more questions and provide fewer answers.

Having a driving question helps me find interesting, less-mainstream content that can help shape my thinking. One question I am exploring is how game-design can drive app-design (not via gamification). The presentation, Building a Princess Saving App, describes it perfectly.

This talk is about building learning and fun into your applications. If you’ve ever wondered how games work and how they can help you build better apps, this is the talk for you. Along the way, we’ll discuss a new philosophy of interaction design that is already creating a major competitive advantage for innovative application developers.

The slides describe how typical enterprise and Web 2.0 application designers might approach the problem of saving a princess vs. how Super Mario Brothers does it.

Along the way you learn the language of game-design and the STARS model. Well worth a read if you are interested in this topic.

A few days ago, I wondered about soundtracks for books. I had an aside where I mentioned that game soundtracks are synchronized with the player’s actions (like a book’s would have to be).

That is also true of a non-game app. If an app had a soundtrack, then it would also be synchronized with behavior, state, situations, etc.

Apps often use system sounds. So, if you do something that isn’t allowed, you could get an error beep. Alerts similarly come with a sound. That’s been around probably since the first GUIs. Those aren’t soundtracks.

But, I’ve been trying to think about all apps as potentially games, or having game design drive the app design. So, that means sound design has to be part of it. In fact, I think it’s a tell that not being able to conceive of sound design for an app means that it isn’t using game-driven design. What’s the soundtrack to MS Word?

In Pokémon Go vs. Apple Workouts, I said that game-design doesn’t drive the Workouts app—it’s slapped on. And even though I play music while doing a workout, that’s not a soundtrack either.

But every workout app could have a sound layer to let you know what is going on. in Sprint-o-Mat, I give you a ding when it’s time to start sprinting. Apple workouts have pace alerts.

But, what more could you do? In AR opens up playability, I said that even mundane apps could become games with AR (e.g. Grocery List vs. Zombies). We have a kind of AR right now with just headphones, so maybe the right sound-design (more than music or system sounds) could make a workout more like a game.

So, if the game in Sprint-o-Mat is a race, here are some ideas for a game-design driven soundtrack:.

1. Crowd sound
2. Have the crowd yell out your name
3. Give a sense of the location of the pace-setter
   1. Footsteps
   2. Heavy breaths
   3. Friendly banter: “C’mon keep up, don’t let me pass”
4. Add in band music that you pass (is at a physical location that you approach and leave)
5. Have an announcer yell out your name and final time at the end