Don’t abuse standard buttons

Four days ago I had submitted a small app to the app store and yesterday I received feedback that I had to make some changes. Out of pure laziness I had re-purposed the “compose” button on a tool bar to call up a settings dialog.

“Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.5.

The compose button is to be used to open a new message view in edit mode. Implementing standard buttons to perform other tasks will lead to user confusion. We recommend using a custom icon.”

I must admit that Apple is right, we want to avoid user confusion at any cost. Also kudos to them for really being strict even if this means for us small-time developers that you have to submit your app with changes several times until they give it the nod.

I ended up creating my own button with a custom image of a cockwheel and while being at it I also replaced the play button with a record button, again by my own design.