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How we built the new Exec iPhone App

blog.iamexec.com

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Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#21

Post by namank »

potatolicious wrote: post #12
eps wrote: post #3

I'm sorry, but I don't like this UI at all. It looks foreign on the iOS as if it were designed for some other device and the ported over. Such neglect for the consistency with a native look and feel is not a "fun experience", it's really quite annoying. My iPhone is not an empty canvas for you to drop an arbitrary UI style on. It comes with Helvetica and a whole bunch of well designed controls. I insist you use them.

That ship has sailed a long time ago. Pull-to-refresh, that-slide-out-navigation-from-the-left, fan-out-navigation, parallax scrolling, all are now common iOS UI tropes that originated nowhere near Apple. Personally I hate that back button - it's huge , but that's a pretty minor gripe in the grand scheme of things. This UI is clean, functional, and its functionality is intuitive. Pretty decent win, all things conside…

I hate that back button

I have never been able to used to the back button or the bluish-gray top nav bar Apple insists on using. If I ever spend time thinking about it, I feel like puking, no exaggeration.

But my dislike for the bar is offset by rest of the device.

Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#22

Post by gurkendoktor »

gfosco wrote: post #6
eps wrote: post #3

I'm sorry, but I don't like this UI at all. It looks foreign on the iOS as if it were designed for some other device and the ported over. Such neglect for the consistency with a native look and feel is not a "fun experience", it's really quite annoying. My iPhone is not an empty canvas for you to drop an arbitrary UI style on. It comes with Helvetica and a whole bunch of well designed controls. I insist you use them.

On the contrary, I prefer if an app brings a unique and purpose-built UI. For example, 'Clear' the to-do list app is quite amazing. 'Paper' by 53 is another incredible interface. 'Figure' by PropellerHead is another awesome example. Why do games get a pass, but everything else is expected to re-use the same library of controls and fonts? I don't want all apps to look the same, they just have to be intuitive. The exam…

I love Clear and Paper and there are more examples (Tiny Piano, Apple's utilities). But I think the difference is this: It is great if an app "becomes the device" and does its task better than UIKit could do it. But if an app does 'boring' stuff like drilling down into forms to send them, or giving the user a table of settings, then what's the reason to leave UIKit? There is absolutely no UX advantage here, to the contrary, it even has the typical "designer's back buttons" again that don't show where they lead to.

Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#23

Post by jordanthoms »

Funny to see him talking about reading the header files of the built-in classes to guess how they work - One of the things I prefer about Android development is being able to easily dig into the source, most of it is easily understandable and it gives a good authoritative reference.

Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#24

Post by malandrew »

eps wrote: post #3

I'm sorry, but I don't like this UI at all. It looks foreign on the iOS as if it were designed for some other device and the ported over. Such neglect for the consistency with a native look and feel is not a "fun experience", it's really quite annoying. My iPhone is not an empty canvas for you to drop an arbitrary UI style on. It comes with Helvetica and a whole bunch of well designed controls. I insist you use them.

The web, a platform with seemingly unlimited extensibility in terms of UI design, has fostered some of the worst designs ever seen.... but also some of the best designs ever seen. But most importantly, we all all richer because of the competition and diversity in interfaces that it has fostered.

I don't know why you wouldn't wish the same in the iOS ecosystem as well, especially since it is an ecosystem with a comparatively better sense of taste relative to other developer communities, meaning that when it does deviate from the norm it is more likely to get it right than other communities might. Why would we want to neuter the creativity and taste that community has?

Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#25

Post by maz29 »

Hey, great write-up. I feel that if you're creating a simple app you can only get so far with the built-in theming. Custom animations/themes are critical to make a fun, useful, and simple apps. I would love to see a blog post/tutorial on this topic.

Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#27

Post by MaxGabriel »

bsaul wrote: post #9

Really curious to know why you had to reimplement Uikit uiview subclasses instead of just extending them and use ib to position them. Drawrect overriding has always been the recommended approach, and at least you can position buttons and panes and tableviews using ib , simply changing the name of the class in IB...

UIAlertView atleast doesn't support subclassing.

Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#28

Post by hboon »

bsaul wrote: post #9

Really curious to know why you had to reimplement Uikit uiview subclasses instead of just extending them and use ib to position them. Drawrect overriding has always been the recommended approach, and at least you can position buttons and panes and tableviews using ib , simply changing the name of the class in IB...

I'm a big fan of not using IB because code is easier to read, extract (constants, functions, component-ize), copy & paste, and version control. I also build a UIView class hierarchy so I can stash all my view-related code there instead of putting them in controller classes.

A major reason of using IB is you can position and view their layout visually. But when you build iOS apps that have (1) custom UI components, (2) uses a good amount of animation, or (3) have different enough portrait and landscape views, you can hardly see anything useful when looking at that nib in IB.

NB: re-reading this, I was more responding to Chad's point "Having over 30 screens to program (no Interface Builder here) meant that an overwhelming majority of the time on the app was spent writing interface code." rather than why not extending existing UIKit classes like UIAlertView/UIActionShet which MaxGabriel answered.

Re: How we built the new Exec iPhone App

#29

Post by HNSucksAss »

namank wrote: post #21
potatolicious wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship has sailed a long time ago. Pull-to-refresh, that-slide-out-navigation-from-the-left, fan-out-navigation, parallax scrolling, all are now common iOS UI tropes that originated nowhere near Apple. Personally I hate that back button - it's huge , but that's a pretty minor gripe in the grand scheme of things. This UI is clean, functional, and its functionality is intuitive. Pretty decent win, all things conside…

I hate that back button I have never been able to used to the back button or the bluish-gray top nav bar Apple insists on using. If I ever spend time thinking about it, I feel like puking, no exaggeration. But my dislike for the bar is offset by rest of the device.

The developer can change the nav-bar color.

But Apple's whole chicklety, gumdroppy motif is quite dated. As is their 25-year-old inverse color scheme for the Mac OS. Reading black text off the glaring surface of a light bulb all day is a shitty way to work.

Not to mention shitty glossy screens.

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