11–20 of 54 posts
It's not a silver bullet (it can sometimes give you a bit of a performance hit), but the Nimbus library has a UILabel subclass that makes bolding a substring a lot less painful than manual NSAttributedString munging: http://docs.nimbuskit.info/group___nimbus_attributed_label.h...
"there must be an iOS equivalent of the tag, right? Apparently not." Just use three labels, with the middle label set to bold.
tl;dr: open the Organizer, go to Devices, click Provisioning Profiles in the top left, and click the '+'. It does 90% of what you'll need.
If you need more, pick someone, and have them read every piece of official documentation they can find. It's all explained quite well, lots of troubleshooting tools are linked to and explained, definitely worth the day it'll take to have at least one person who understands it. But it will take a day. ONLY THEN should you go to Stack Overflow for remaining questions for this one - there's a lot of misunderstanding and too-old answers and "solutions" that only work for a single-developer business, all of which will just leave you in a semi-broken state that you don't understand enough about to get out of.
For provisioning woes, do as much as you can within XCode (you can provision a LOT from the organizer). It takes care of a lot of the 'download this, then that, install these, don't forget X, etc' steps. Most tutorials on the interwebs won't send you down this route though, because it's relatively new (version 4.something). tl;dr: open the Organizer, go to Devices, click Provisioning Profiles in the top left, and cli…
Ditto. Apple's documentation really is top-notch. Having a doc-guru handy is always a boon to productivity, at least in my experience.
- He's very right about previewing on the device. I like xScope better than Silkscreen, because it can stream anything, both file, or screen region, and overall it's a nice designer's utility belt. There's nothing like that for android, at least I haven't found anything that works, and Android needs this even more, because it usually uses OLED, not LED screens.
- Unless you have plenty of time and very little UI, you shouldn't optimise for @1x design. The key is to design @2x assets that are ALWAYS even. Everything has to be 2 pixels or even-sized, every line, button size, coordinate and so on. To achieve crisp, 1px lines on Retina, you can do 1px strokes (for example, on button), but you have to make sure they are inside evenly sized (round-)rect, and twice as "strong" (darker, lighter, etc.), so that when PhotoShop resizes that 1px line, its darkness is mixed with the next pixel inside the button, and looks right on standard resolution.
- Another app I highly recommend: Slicy. Saved me many hours of work, and can automate the whole process of exporting assets.
- Keep the asset naming consistent, that will make developers happier and more productive.
- Learn at least the basics of iOS and Android app development. Basics are easy, and you will learn how developers layout the interfaces. That will get you thinking while designing, what assets will allow developers to make the design easiest and simplest to implement. In many cases, a well-prepared PNG can save many lines of code.
Add to that "You'll never know how it performs until it's on a phone". Not sure if it's exactly a surprise, but if this is your first app it may not be glaringly obvious.
I have an equally long list of things I would love to share as a long time web developer who moved into iOS and wanted to do things "the right way". This post from SeatGeek and all of the Bjango articles[1] are excellent resources for someone getting started with this
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> Provisioning and distribution is a nightmare I fully agree. I threw myself in at the deep end - never spent any length of time on Mac OS and only working from tutorials for Xcode, it was atrocious trying to figure it out!
It's deliberately hard, because developers are trying to implement a use case which Apple has tried to prevent. The are four different options: a) Developer builds which have to be installed using Xcode for each phone. That won't work for anyone able to install. b) Ad-Hoc builds, which must be specified for each phone. Again that doesn't scale. c) Enterprise builds, which install on a unlimited number of phones. This…
A few sidenotes:
b) TestFlight (https://testflightapp.com/) makes ad-hoc distribution marginally better. Adding new users to the build still requires grabbing their UDID and mucking around with the provisioning portal, but installing/updating to the latest build is infinitely easier for your users.
c) As long as you're not blatantly flaunting Apple's rules and bringing in hundreds or thousands of users, you can most likely get away with using enterprise distribution for beta testers. I've gotten invites to a half-dozen iOS apps built by friends who release their friends-and-family beta using an enterprise profile to avoid manual provisioning hell.
I'm designing iOS and Android apps full-time for over a year now. A couple of tips from me: - He's very right about previewing on the device. I like xScope better than Silkscreen, because it can stream anything, both file, or screen region, and overall it's a nice designer's utility belt. There's nothing like that for android, at least I haven't found anything that works, and Android needs this even more, because it…
"there must be an iOS equivalent of the tag, right? Apparently not." Just use three labels, with the middle label set to bold.
Doesn't that make you "too" responsible for the spacing? Is it as easy to get the distance between two labels to be exactly one space? Or can you include trailing/leading spaces in the strings, and have them automatically laid out? Note: I (obviously) don't program for iOS, but the above recommendation would be non-trivial in the toolkit I know best (GTK+) which is why I'm curious.