Surprises When Designing An iPhone App • Hacker News Board

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#31

Post by bennyg » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 8:15 PM UTC

unwind wrote: post #6

10dpd wrote: post #3

"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.

Sure it makes you responsible, but this is a very, very easy solution to the problem. Obviously, for dynamically iterating, an NSAttributedString is the "best" solution.

You just line them up in interface builder and use your eyes and the arrow cursor to get it right. For static text on a non-changing screen like this, this solution is probably the best.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#32

Post by guelo » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 8:25 PM UTC

flixic wrote: post #29

ed209 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previewing on Android: There is this http://code.google.com/p/android-ui-utils/

Did you manage to get it working? Because me and a fellow android developer couldn't.

Has worked really well for me, nice and simple.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#33

Post by hayksaakian » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 8:46 PM UTC

A lot of rough designs can be done in HTML with something like Ratchet. When you can commit to a mockup, start thinking about how to implement that in obj.c.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#34

Post by BenSS » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 8:58 PM UTC

Great rundown of the process for your first app! I do disagree that knowing web UI instantly qualifies you to build an iOS interface. I've seen some bad app designs from people very good at the web.

Generally, I think the problem is not respecting the minimum touch sizes, and not allowing yourself to use more screens and popovers. You can learn a lot just by reading the HIG, and looking at other apps though.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#35

Post by sandofsky » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 9:25 PM UTC

For bolding text, create an attributed string and draw it with CoreText. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8322020/display-nsattribu...

If you only support iOS 6, you can use a UILabel and set the "attributedText" property.

I notice a lot of new iOS developers jump to open source libraries to abstract away important frameworks. It might save an hour, but I think it's counterproductive to not do things by hand the first time.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#36

Post by jcromartie » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 9:39 PM UTC

sigh

This just reminds me how I'm still trying to convince some devs (and customers) of the importance of having Retina graphics at all, let alone starting with @2x and then supporting @1x later.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#37

Post by muzzamike » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

duopixel wrote: post #7

10dpd wrote: post #3

"there must be an iOS equivalent of the tag, right? Apparently not." Just use three labels, with the middle label set to bold.

If the app were to be displayed in other language it would mess up the word spacing.

At least you wouldn't need a new image for each new language.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#38

Post by muzzamike » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 9:52 PM UTC

I'm pretty shocked you didn't use TestFlight or some equivalent. Did you manually build test versions of the app on all your tester's devices? How did you manage getting them updates promptly?

I know TestFlight can seem a bit daunting but MAN is it worth it in the long run.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#39

Post by andrew_k » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 10:24 PM UTC

SeoxyS wrote: post #30

staufman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I actually wrapped this library with a simple HTML parser that can understand basic tags ( , , , etc.) and translate them into calls to Nimbus. At some point, I'd love to incorporate a Fireball markdown parser so that authored and styled content from our servers can just be pulled from our app.

You might be interested in something I plan to open source at some point: a native Markdown lexing / parsing engine meant to be used to stylize markdown for Core Text / NSAttributedString. Here's the meat of it in a gist: https://gist.github.com/29dabe4b6e762ee221df

Thanks a lot for the link, I was going to write Markdown -> NSAttributedString library myself, because I couldn't find one. Right now I'm just using DTCoreText and convert Markdown to HTML on the server.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#40

Post by BenSS » Tue, Dec 11, 2012, 10:41 PM UTC

bingoturdbell wrote: post #5

jamesjguthrie wrote: post #4

> 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!

And since it's a closed ecosystem, there's no way for a startup to come along and make the process easier. It all lies on Apple.

Testflight has made it a LOT easier, granted Apple could change things entirely one day and leave them dead in the water. XCode has significantly improved in auto provisioning too, still painful when something breaks, but not as bad as it was.