Category: Design

Settings and Debug Mode

henning

One thing I did in my app is record some of the user actions, and if they do a certain particular sequence of actions, then enable a debug mode. This is really handy and I highly recommend it. I’ve used it in the past to allow me to email myself a log of everything the user has done in the app, which helps me debug problems.

In iBorrow, I only use it for one purpose. I add a “Populate Fake Data” field to the Settings view. This gives me a data set to work from instead of having an empty app. You can see this data in screenshots on other posts here.

Eventually I plan to add other things, but for now it’s pretty simple. I wonder how many other apps have a hidden mode like this that I could uncover if I only knew the secret?

Designing My Red/Gold Theme

henning

I’m in the middle of designing the red/gold theme for my app, and I’m not happy with the results so far. Here are two variations that I’ve thought of, and I don’t think either is good enough.

Variation One:

Variation Two:

Both of them look garish. I think I need to change the gold colour to look more gold as well.

[Update: In the end I went with neither of them and used a third alternative. You can see it a little in my next post.]

Added a Dark Theme

henning

I know I said I’d talk about my designs for the borrow view next, but I just got the dark theme working and I think it looks great, so I wanted to post pictures. It’s based off the Apple Watch app. Actually, the colours are a direct ripoff, so I’ll be tweaking them to make them my own. But I wanted to use something as a starting point, just to get things working.

Default theme:

   

New Dark theme:

   

InVision Studio – A Few Days Later – Early Access

henning

I’ve had the InVision Studio “Early Access” version for a couple days now and to be honest I haven’t used it a lot.

The biggest problem is that there isn’t a component library of iOS interface bits and pieces. In other words, I can’t put a status bar or navbar or tabbar or table view into my app without building it from scratch. This really hampers my ability to do anything useful with the app.

DesignCode has a Sketch component library (available here: https://designcode.io/ios11-ui-kit) that’s pretty good. InVision Studio supports importing Sketch files, but importing the DesignCode file posed two problems. first, it doesn’t import properly because InVision Studio is a different app and has different capabilites than Sketch. So while there’s lots of stuff that IS imported, lots of it is just a bit off. The second problem is that InVision Studio doesn’t seem to support large files as well as Sketch does, because maneuvering around this large file is filled with a lot of lag, and it’s very hard to be productive when everything takes many seconds to do. And this is with a current 13″ MacBook Pro.

That said, I can still see the promise in this app. If the InVision folks come out with a native iOS component library, I’m sure it’ll work a lot better than trying to import a Sketch one. It would be nice if Apple provided one too – they already have one that supports Sketch and Adobe XD.

Adobe XD – My 7 Day Trial

henning

After the problems with Gravit Designer, I looked around for another app design program that I could use to design my app. I’m still waiting on InVision Studio, which looks like it could be a game changer, but I don’t have it yet. It was supposed to launch in January, and I guess they’re still polishing some features.

I turned to Adobe XD. I didn’t think there was a demo, but there is! Sketch has a 30 day trial, but Adobe XD’s trail period is only seven days. So I downloaded and tried it out for seven days.

Long story short, XD is a lot better than Gravit. The masking stuff was tricky to use, but I was glad it was there, and I used it extensively to make things like a circular image. I wish that I could tint images that I imported. Sometimes working with grouped items doesn’t work as seamlessly as it should. The prototyping stuff was nice – I could save the file on my Mac, and just load it up in the sister iOS app and check it out on my device. There didn’t seem to be any responsive design stuff – I had to choose one size to work on. Maybe I just missed it.

The trial period was only six days. While I learned a lot about the app in six days, I feel that the one month trial that Sketch provides is a better to gauge the actual capabilities of the app. It felt like I was just getting into XD when I couldn’t use it anymore.

I’m still waiting for InVision Studio, and then I’ll make my final decision!

Gravit Designer – My Thoughts

henning

I’ve only been using Gravit Designer for a few days, but I’m going to abandon it. It’s too frustrating to use. I have a couple examples.

When you login to the website to view a design on an iOS device, the design doesn’t render accurately. Drop shadows, for example, don’t work. Which makes looking at a design with a critical eye impossible on my iPhone or iPad.

I tried copy/pasting a small image to use elsewhere on the same page of the design. I couldn’t move the image! What happened instead was that I was moving the bounding box or something, and I could not grab the actual image. This was very frustrating.

At this stage I’ve given up on Gravit. I am anxiously waiting to try our InVision App Studio. I hope I get my invite soon. In the meantime I think I’ll check out Figma.

Looking for Design Software

henning

I am working on a new app. WAY beginning stages. I think I’ll do it right and design it all up beforehand instead of winging it like I used to do. So I’m looking for some good software that’ll help me. Preferably something easy to use and not too expensive, and that gets the job done. (My background: I know Photoshop well enough to create decent YouTube thumbnails. LOL. )

I would really like a feature where I could replace the whole colour scheme, so I can test out different themes. So I’ve been looking around for such software, and it looks like there’s nothing that does that, so I guess that aspect of design will be that much harder.

I’ve looked at Sketch, which seems to be the industry standard. It’s not bad, but there’s something about the workflow that rubs me the wrong way. I just can seem to do what I want as quickly as I want.

I tried Gravit Designer too. It’s much like Sketch when it comes to workflow, but it has even more problems. It’s web based, which is cool because you can use it anywhere, but sucks because the Mac version is obviously just a web app. Yuck. But it’s free, so I’ve been trying it out.

Figma I just discovered, and it’s web based as well. I still need to do some more investigation.

I just signed up for the InVision Studio beta (here: beta), we’ll see how long it takes me to get it in. But I have high hopes. It’s a native app that’s free, looks pretty cool.

Those are the options I’m looking at right now. We’ll see how this goes…