Have you ever seen a good movie? Think for a second about that movie. What made it good?

Now imagine if you could make that movie even better for yourself. Imagine this movie was distributed along with a plastic box with a few knobs and dials on it. Wouldn't it be a better movie if you could turn the knobs to adjust the parameters of the movie -- there really aren't that many fundamental parameters to movies. You could adjust the heights of the actors, or the amount of furniture in a scene, or the physicality of risk and harm that characters endured, or even just add more redheads.

What if that box also asked what kind of movie you're in the mood for, or who your other favorite directors are. Then the movie could switch out some plot elements and style decisions to become a little bit more like another movie you wanted to watch.

Or what if instead of watching one particular movie you could just add movies together. Like say you wanted to watch Terminator 2, but alternating scenes with Clueless. Or maybe you could just put picture-in-picture, with all your favorite movies together on the same screen!

How great would that be!

I would like to counter this advice by saying that I don't think acquiescing to the whims of walled garden rulers is the best solution. If your vision was to create what you have already created, how could you modify it to a product that you think is worse for your users because its what Apple wants? It pains me just reading suggestions about implementing these tacked on functions.

So the answer is feature bloat.

Here's another idea: Let's build a compiler that automatically adds features to apps that appear too simple.

The compiler should be able to learn from descriptions of existing apps what kinds of things are currently fashionable and find an unobtrusive way to integrate them into your app.

I actually did this policy to get one of my apps in the store. As more people eventually use it (and presumably good reviews roll in), I anticipate that I will be able to remove the features which I didn't think were needed.

On the other hand, I really don't like the idea of apple having editorial review over apps for being too simple. The only app which I feel might be too simple is an additional fart or flashlight app. And I'm still inclined to let those be distributed in some way (if not directly through the app store process).

Rating your happiness from 1 to 10 would make it easy for the scale to drift. How do you compare how you felt today to how you felt 8 months back, the last time you issued a 10?

I think comparing with yesterday is a great way to do this: I still know exactly how I felt yesterday, and I know how I feel today.

The app in this article is rubbish, and there are several others like it already in the app store. This was probably just an advertisement for the company, and since HN has knee-jerk reactions to anything containing the word Apple, it seems to be working.

Don't make any of those categories/icons rounded rects with a label though. I just got rejected for that and had to remove the rounded rect part. I had been using them in a manner similar to Panic's Status Board app to handle configuration of a photo sales app[0].

0: http://studioproapp.com

Sounds familiar.. I made a similar app last year, and had to add features - the ability to track a number of questions, curved thumb sliders, social media integration, etc. but it did get accepted, and has been doing pretty well.

Like this, it started as something I wanted to use, and grew from there. slidersapp.com if anyone is interested.

(I am wondering where to go with it next... online platform, android port, etc.)

The irony of it all is that the top app on the app store is a sleep cycle alarm which seems to do little beyond graphing your sleep routines.

Maybe it's because they charge for that and apple are happier with "simple" apps if they can make money from them

I actually really like the concept of relating your happiness in a binary fashion on a day to day basis relative to the previous day. With each previous day forming a control the results can be dynamic and very in a range far greater than 1 to 10.

You know that you have achieved perfection in design not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to take away. --Antoin de Saint-Exüpery

Or maybe they're making a mood tracker for their future Healthbook app and they're trying to put a block on similar apps...

    I'd rather rate my happiness on a 1-10 scale rather than
    compare with yesterday, and also maybe be asked 3-4 times
    a day.

I use TagTime for this on Android: http://www.jefftk.com/p/happiness-logging