This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this in the Mac App Store, which in my experience is still really buggy.
Category: Apple
Fit and Finish
There was a time where I would have assumed this was purely Adobe’s fault, but given the graphical glitches in the last several releases of OS X…
Hype Pro Released
If you want to design UI transitions and responsive layouts without writing the code yourself, Hype Pro is a great option.
To work out the details for specific UI transitions, I frequently just copy and paste design elements from my Sketch document into Hype and go from there. Keep in mind that it is generally easier to manipulate text and boxes if they are created in Hype itself.
For more involved UI simulations, the addition of symbols (particularly those that persist across scenes) makes such a thing much easier to manage than in older versions of Hype.
Bling Edition
I wonder if Tim Cook's embarrassment is a tell; a sign that Cook didn't want to make a gold watch. That the Apple Watch Edition is a vanity project for Jony Ive, a luxury watch aficionado who rides in a Bentley to work every day. A $10,000 watch (or even $17,000, the highest priced model) is not Apple. While the company is often criticized for selling products at prices higher than competitors, Apple has always backed these prices up with higher quality and better design. Apple has never been a company of bling, and the Apple Watch Edition is bling, nothing more.
Given the many times he has talked about form following naturally from function, I thought Ive had more taste than to design an ostentatious display of wealth. Then again, in the recent New Yorker profile of Ive, his “friend and former London colleague” Clive Grinyer did say that Ive has “always been a bit bling.”
Hype Pro
The Tumult team has done some great work on the upcoming Hype Pro. If you are a designer who wants to move beyond static mockups and tools that limit you to canned animations, you’ll want to check it out.
The Leaking Balloon
The Mac App Store was released in January 2011 and it marked the beginning of a great new distribution channel. Even though it lacked some bells and whistles, the developer community was hopeful the problems would be addressed in due course. Unfortunately, it has been years and there’s no evidence that the core issues would be addressed in the future, at all.
I bought Affinity Designer recently because I was able to use the beta releases, which proved the app to be stable, performant, and very functional. I don’t buy Mac apps without being able to try them.
Visual and Interaction Design on the Mac
It’s a hopeful time for design tools on the Mac.
- Adobe having killed Fireworks, I’ve moved over to Boheman Coding’s Sketch. The addition of symbols in v3 made it practical to use for larger projects. I still miss shared layers from Fireworks, but not the crashes.
- Affinity Designer has great performance, a customizable UI, and a good balance of vector and bitmap tools. It’s not geared toward mocking up numerous screen views, but it seems like a good option for individual illustrations and icons.
- Flying Meat’s Acorn is a great alternative to Photoshop if you need bitmap editing capabilities.
- Quasado’s Gravit provides a good deal of Fireworks’ functionality in an open source, web technologies-based package. It’s still very much a work in progress (no Boolean ops on vectors, no vector export, bugs, etc.), but it already surpasses Fireworks in some ways. The multiple master pages would have been great in Fireworks.
- Not having been released, I have not used it, but there is good reason to believe that Bjango’s Skala will be a quality visual design app.
- Relative Wave’s Form looks like a way to build iOS prototypes without all the complexity of Quartz Composer.
- Along similar lines, there is Facebook’s Origami.
- Framer Studio is another good option for mobile prototyping. There are many examples if you’re new to writing JavaScript.
- Tumult’s Hype is a good way to build interactive prototypes without coding. I’ve built fairly extensive prototypes using the combination of Sketch and Hype. Unlike Form and Origami, Hype’s output can run on anything with a decent browser.
Most designers for screens could be well served by some combination of the above. My workflow these days is mostly doing graphics and some layout in Sketch, then prototyping in the browser using jQuery with Velocity.js or Snap.svg for animation.
9-Sliced in Sketch
A UI detail for Sketch 3 that would help when working on a file you haven’t touched in a while or one you didn’t create like an inherited project or a downloaded template.
“An Apple every 20 seconds…”
Minimal Cover in Sight
When in the Artist view in iTunes, rather than album covers scrolling along with the tracks, they should bump up against the header and stay in view until all of the album’s tracks scroll out of view, much like Music on the iPad or the header bars in the iOS Contacts app.
