This is not a major pivot but comes out of the Pioneer chat feedback in June and discussions with other supporters of Touchgram. There's also the possibility of a co-branding page running touchme.me as a different landing page. It can add some fun extras to what people expect from Memes.
As the concept has been refined over the last couple of weeks, I've added content in at the top so you can see the latest iteration.
This is a dogfooding exercise - using a Touchgram to teach people how to use Touchgram.
I had a much fancier version of this planned and, due to its complexity, it was scheduled for later.
Thanks to Evan Warfel for suggesting I have a simple trace a smiley face sample to teach people basic interaction - he prompted me to move this up the agenda and include something a lot simpler. I realised that the simple text support in the TouchMeme version was enough to provide some on-screen hinting and so Touchie came to life.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/6df8bb6f-c5f3-41b0-9436-226d077b76a9/TouchieTeachesTouch_720p.mp4
What you're seeing here in this video is a Touchgram message being played back inside Apple Messages. The experience is identical playing a message composed on your phone to one you receive.
This simple message has a background picture on each page, with one or two bits of overlay text and one sensor per page. The following two screenshots show the tree view that's the current view in the Composer. You can see how each page works.
There are a few design decisions in the tree above. TouchMemes introduce the idea of overlaid shapes on top of the background. For now, they are being kept in the main tree, so you can scroll through everything in the the Touchgram. However, a lighter font is used to reduce their emphasis.
For the text overlays in the meme pages, I also decided in this version to use an italic font to hint at the idea this is a quotation - what appears on the row, next to the A icon, is literally the text that's on the page. For icons and other shapes, it may be a picture title, which won't be italic.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/bbaf08b4-61d9-4154-9b39-d27e1b5e8808/_TouchMemeMordorWithSource.mov
This screen recording shows the Mordor Meme sample now built into Touchgram as of v1.3.0. In the Faves window, after you have chosen Add Samples from the tool menu, you see a long list of samples. As shown above, you can select one and play it. You can also use the Tools menu and View Source to see a full breakdown of the Touchgram.
The earlier playback in the gif below is from a demo app that plays the Touchgram in a full-size window. I thought it would be interesting to leave here as contrast to the version above playing in the shipped iMessage app. Note how the background is just scaled to fit. When a future version of Touchgram allows playing and composing in the main app, not just iMessage, it will look more like this below.
The font bug(s) wrestled into submission, on its way into the store, here's a playback.