Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
blog.hipmunk.com
Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#2It's refreshing to see this level of humility from a developer and a cool startup. No one knows everything, and realizing that is the first step to allowing yourself to learn.
Kudos on a sweet app! I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys build next!
Oh, and thanks for sharing! If everyone was more open about the tools they use, I think apps would be a lot better in general.
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#3It's refreshing to see this level of humility from a developer and a cool startup. No one knows everything, and realizing that is the first step to allowing yourself to learn. Kudos on a sweet app! I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys build next! Oh, and thanks for sharing! If everyone was more open about the tools they use, I think apps would be a lot better in general.
I completely agree. Nothing new ever comes if we just work within our comfort zones and don't continue to learn.
Kudos to Steve and Adam on hiring Danilo.
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#4I've never heard of Opacity before but this looks pretty awesome. Anyone else used it for iOS or Mac apps and can weigh in on how well it works?
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#5[deleted]
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#6It's refreshing to see this level of humility from a developer and a cool startup. No one knows everything, and realizing that is the first step to allowing yourself to learn. Kudos on a sweet app! I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys build next! Oh, and thanks for sharing! If everyone was more open about the tools they use, I think apps would be a lot better in general.
Really glad you enjoyed the post! More than ever, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Glad to share whatever insight I can to make things easier on others.
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#7I've never heard of Opacity before but this looks pretty awesome. Anyone else used it for iOS or Mac apps and can weigh in on how well it works?
You've already heard a bit of my endorsement, but I'll give you more in the hopes you'll try out the app. It comes with a trial period, so don't be squeamish.
The awesome:
- Fucking persistent corner rounding for rectangles. So you can adjust the size without screwing up your round rects' corners. WTF, Photoshop? How hard is this to do?
- edit: ALSO, easy Retina display support. No thought required
- Factories, as described in my post
- Badass pen tool for bezier shapes. Anchor points snap to guides in a very intuitive way, as do those fiddly little handles for curvy anchor points. It's much easier to create an arbitrary shape in Opacity than it is in PS or Illustrator.
- Much more flexible layer layer styling than Photoshop. Want two strokes on that vector? Fuck yeah, there you go.
- Variables. No shit. So, say you want the same button in five different colors. Set up a color variable, tie it to the button's fill property, then set up five factories with different color variables. Change the button's appearance, then the factory will dump out five brand new versions identical to your new changes
- Code generation: So maybe you suck at Quartz or want to use a GUI to create a starting point. Build your image in Opacity, then use the "Source Code" factory type. It'll spit out native drawing code using the drawing library of your choosing (Cocoa, Quartz, Core Animation). Variables work with this, too.
What needs improvement:
- Drawing performance is spotty, especially when dealing with bezier vectors. I see more pinwheels than I'm used to in Opacity, and that's on a late 2010 machine. This has been improving – I sent a sample file to the dev and he made some optimizations that helped a lot. Still, needs more work here.
- If you've built your existing UI assets in Photoshop, there's no easy way to get them into Opacity. You're probably going to end up recreating them, but since Opacity's tools are for the most part much better, this isn't terrible. Gives you a chance to spruce things up.
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#8It's refreshing to see this level of humility from a developer and a cool startup. No one knows everything, and realizing that is the first step to allowing yourself to learn. Kudos on a sweet app! I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys build next! Oh, and thanks for sharing! If everyone was more open about the tools they use, I think apps would be a lot better in general.
Creating my first iPhone app for a company too as my graduation project, and have very much the same feeling: "when will the catch me". So far so good, but oh how I hate the tools. First time working with OS X and X Code, an some things just suck.
For example, Android's location support is 200x better and has native support for loading a KML file as a route. I have to use someones custom class for iPhone, and can't test "significant movement notification" without an iPhone 4 on hand and actually walking a mile...
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#9I've never heard of Opacity before but this looks pretty awesome. Anyone else used it for iOS or Mac apps and can weigh in on how well it works?
I've used it for a few iOS projects. It's strength is making multi-state things like buttons and automating different resolution images (i.e. Retina). The factories feature combined with "variables" makes it a powerful vector editor. I'm not affiliated with the developer, I just think it's a great app.
Re: Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it
#10I just booked a trip to Key West, FL recently. I used KAYAK and throughout the entire process, I was thinking, there must be a better way. What took me nearly two hours a few weeks ago, would have taken me mere minutes on this site. I will not forget this site.