TLDR?: Scroll to the bottom to see the working result
I was recently asked by a client what I thought of Omma, an AI-agent based platform built by Spline for making 3D, Apps and Websites. Not knowing much, I decided to test it out, being a regular Spline user.
Building an app with Generative AI and a few prompts seems like a tall order. I’m not a developer at all, so I wondered just how I could go from knowing nothing about coding to building something useable in what’s promised to be a fraction of the time of full-stack development.
To really put Omma to the test, I decided on an idea for a real-use app that I’ve had in my mind since moving to Cyprus. Bookable rail travel.
At the time of writing, there are zero rail networks on the island. At one point there was a line across the island, but this quickly became unused once the occupying British government had left in the 60s. The Cypriot population at that time had no use for rail, and focused their efforts on building more car-based infrastructure. Fast-forward 60 years, and the island is crying out for rail with growing traffic and almost double the population in cities.
Apart from coastline, Cyprus pretty rugged, it has the Troodos mountain range in the middle of the island, paired with the northern half of the island being occupied by the Republic of Northern Cyprus. It’s a bit of a nightmare trying to think of how a rail network might look to connect Limassol, Paphos, Nicosia and Larnaca in one comprehensive network.
I started by illustrating a map of Cyprus and dotting out the major cities and hypothetical routes connecting them all, with four different train lines that would give Cypriots realistic routes to reach each city and smaller towns in between. I used Amtrak’s rail network as inspiration, as a similarly car-dependant nation.
When the map was finished, I fed it into Omma and asked it to create a rail app for Cyprus based on the network I’d created. The result was something that looked like a blob of bubble gum, with half the track ending up in the sea.
Omma's generated map
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The app also looks pretty basic at this point, it’s a reskin of the Trainline app without the branding. I’m also not a big fan of the overuse of emojis in apps. Time to put my design skills to the test.
To make things easier for Omma, I converted the map into an SVG and removed all station names to see what it would come up with, and if it would respect Geopolitical boundaries.
One fed an SVG, the AI agents seemed to get the message and made something close to what I had in mind, it even filled in stops between cities with commuter towns that I didn’t think to include.
Happy with the map part, I moved onto the booking page of the app, which had filled in a few routes between major cities, including an Airport Express between Nicosia and Larnaca which I’d left hidden on my Illustration. Omma had even proposed prices for each trip, which the users of r/Cyprus thought were too expensive. It’s likely that Omma had based these prices and the entire design off of Trainline and taken inspiration from expensive UK rail travel. If this was going to convert Cypriots to using rail, it had to be cheaper than driving.
I’d prompted Omma to decreased all rail travel by 35%, and to include a return trip. After telling it not to decrease prices as part of a ‘Summer Sale’ (we’re still in March), it knocked prices down and even made return journeys better value. I wish this were true of Trainline prices
The logo it had generated for Cyprus Rail was just a train emoji. I wondered if you could feed it another SVG to get that emoji out of the picture.
A quick logo was designed on Illustrator with a Cyprus-based colour palette of Teal and Gold. The SVG was fed in and a prompt was given to change the entire app to the colour scheme of the logo. An entirely different logo that looked a bit like toothpaste was generated, and needed guidance to just stick to what I’d made. This can work better if you Augment prompts.
With branding in mind, I made an icon suite based off of the emojis Omma had used for each rail route. My own design inputs helped steer away from the reskin look of the app. It just needed a loading animation to finish the job.
My designed Icon Suite
I made a simple 3-second ident of the logo and word mark to play when opening the app. Omma does allow you to input animation into its prompts as video and Lottie files. But it just takes your animation as a reference, and creates something different and arguably worse. You can’t really generate decent Motion Graphics that responds to a brand yet.
The loading animations are my own work, looking ten times better than the working project
The finished app build is here. It's not bad for an experiment.
The Pros:
- Great for casual apps and UI component building
- Customisable colour schemes and fonts
- Lightweight and loadable UI
- Each project comes with HTML handoff
- Handles SVGs well, it keeps icon sizing consistent and within the grid
- Allows you to publish work on a free account
- You can amend and add assets to your project without using credits
The Cons:
Fairly-expensive when compared to other platforms, starting at $39 per month.
- Very basic UI animation
- You can’t directly import animation yet
- You need to be careful that your work isn’t too similar to existing apps
- No direction integration with Spline at this point
- Iphone mockup with a blend of my own splash animations and the app UI.
Overall, I’m surprised with what it’s done with my idea in a few hours without any development knowledge from my side. It’s not going to be winning any Behance awards, and doesn’t make you a developer for using it, but I’d recommend giving Omma a whirl if you’re curious about interactive design.
