Clipboard DS | 假如可将 Nintendo DS 用作签到表、报名表或夹板？

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What if you could use the Nintendo DS as a sign-in sheet, a sign-up form, a clipboard? If you've ever organized a fighting game tournament or held a class at the library, you know you need something for people to sign up on. Usually it's a clipboard, or a Google Form with a QR code sitting on a little kiosk. What if that was a Nintendo DS on the table in the cafe? That's what Clipboard is designed to be. The name is the application.

When it comes to DS application development, I've been thinking about object design. The DS isn't a tablet. It's not a smartphone. It's a piece of hardware that runs one app at a time. There is no multitasking. When you give it a task, that is the task it becomes. I'm not the only person to have thought about this. Some of the few apps made for the DSi follow this exact trend: a metronome, a music tuner, a skeet shooting thing. I don't know what Hudson Soft was doing with that. A music tuner, for example. You have a DS. You have a guitar. While you're using your guitar, your DS becomes a dedicated piece of hardware, a music tuner. It is no longer a Nintendo DS. Whereas if you have a music tuner on your phone, your phone is still your phone. You might be running the tuner and get an Instagram notification, and next thing you know you're scrolling. The phone is a noise box. It does many, many things. But the DS does one thing at a time, and if you want to do something else, you have to turn it off. This has driven my entire philosophy around designing applications.

With Clipboard, we can imagine a cafe or a card game store hosting an event. They have a DS on the counter, and there it sits. It's the sign-up form. It's the clipboard.

Clipboard has a variety of features. Everything is handled in application. You can make new forms, view forms, manage everything inside the application. But it's all backed up to CSV files, spreadsheets. One of the worst things is having a sign-up sheet of 30 people for the Smash Brothers tournament, everybody put in their email, and now you want to email them for the next tournament, but you've got to input each email by hand because they wrote them down on a clipboard.

The DS, as an object within the physical space, echoes a payment terminal. When you're selecting, do you want cash back? You might have to use a stylus to press on the resistive touch screen. You might even have to sign something. So the design language of inputting small amounts of text into a terminal device is not unknown to the brain. It's fairly natural, especially with a DSi XL. And the real keyboard sound samples should give good feedback when a key is pressed.

You can create multiple choice selections, ask questions, have input fields, and have full control over the forms you create. I hope that with applications like this and others soon to be released, we can see more usage of the DSi, the DS Lite, or the 3DS in places they may never have been intended to be used. Because I don't see this device as just a game console. I see it as a micro-computing piece of hardware with over 200 million units existing in the world that should have more use, and less time in a junk drawer.