Self-promo warning: I make an app that is a design tool specifically for Apple platforms called DetailsPro: https://detailspro.app/
The whole point of it is basically to make designing with SwiftUI easier for more people by making it visual and block-based. You can get the Apple look and use the real elements themselves, rendered live on your device, without writing code.
Would love any feedback, especially from anyone who is getting a lot of out these design resources or Sketch and Figma!
I really hate you’re getting downvoted, yes it’s self promotion but let’s not forget we are on the forum of a startup accelerator designed in part to promote their businesses ... and people who are interested in the topic will likely find value on this app.
So as someone who doesn’t do Apple development on a regular basis, I feel like any time I do try to find some sort of documentation the Google link to Apple’s documentation is broken. Anyone know what the deal is with that?
I have the same issue -- Apple developer documentation, at least what you find on Google, is really awful. Sometimes I even have to watch youtube videos of random developers to figure out how objects' protocols are supposed to work. Developing for Apple is really a huge pain unless you're immersed in that environment.
It’s one of the reasons I abandoned a v2 of my app that was doing low-key quite well in the store. A handful of daily paid app downloads for 0 marketing. I eventually hit a bug in core data in the v2 that drove me to insanity as the docs just didn’t cover what I needed and nothing online helped. I’ve come back as I can see I will eventually burn out in the JS world and SwiftUI is legitimately great (so far for simple stuff) but I know one day I’m going to be in the same spot again - I just take HackingWithSwift as the docs at this point
Apple doesn't care about developer experience. Hardware/software dev at Apple is basically that strong/weak doge meme.
The hardware dev is pushing up against the boundaries of what is possible to manufacture, and they do it with shrinking time scales each cycle.
Apple software gets shittier and harder to develop every year. Some of the stuff I understand, like the onslaught of permissions when everyone upgraded to Catalina. Others like the state of XCode baffle me.
It gets harder and more expensive to target Apple platforms every cycle, no matter how much better the hardware gets.
historically apple's docs were and are pretty awful... apple's docs are going through a transition period right now and it looks like they are breaking backwards compatibility perhaps
Google is littered with broken links to documentation that used to be there and which also could be downloaded offline with xcode.
after maybe 6 years of not looking at it, I looked again in 2018 and was totally thrown away by the desolation. It seems that some articles are kept in "archive" with lots of "beware leopards"-like signs of deprecation, but there's nothing findable anywhere else. Last year I wanted to write a small menu bar icon app... but since I didn't want to use Swift, all I could find was bare method signatures, and I ultimately got discouraged before finding old enough data to get stuff working.
Making the company jump from sketch to figma is bit of a mission (source - I've done it before). The way figma handles frames, is much different to the way sketch handles artboards, auto-import doesn't work as well as you'd hope.
They would have massive numbers of designers, all needing visual assets. If you've got a library to provide consistency to them, moving that library over to another tool is a big mission, no matter how good it is.
I think you'd find figma gets healthy use at apple, like most of the work of UI design is trying a bunch of different solutions, collaboration and feedback, prototyping - I think figma would crop up commonly for that type of work - the 'shaping' phase.
The final step of 'ok make everything look apple' isn't that big compared to everything you've done before that point, jumping tools then isn't the end of the earth.
Believe it or not, most graphic designers are still using Adobe tools. Already hard to get them to move over to Sketch, but it's becoming the norm for digital design. Figma is popular in UI circles, but an exception outside of them.
Graphic design yes - that covers print design, print, digitla and television advertising and many other mediums - but among those designing software applications Figma seems to be kicking ass: https://uxtools.co/survey-2020/
This is nice and all, but as an indie developer, I've never needed to design my app layouts separately from my actual project in Xcode. Maybe I'm going about this development thing all wrong - but as a one-man-band, it would take too much time to design my app layouts outside of the coding environment IMHO.
In case they work.. I've got two SPM modules besides two projects inside a workspace and its impossible to make it work. Complaining about files not being part of any build. Files which are part of other packages which should not be built in the first place!?!
This is very timely as I downloaded that art bundle yesterday to make an icon for a new Mac app.
Can someone tell me how to use that Apple Photoshop template for app icons?
I've been using Photoshop since version 1.0, I understand layers etc, & I'm still baffled.
I get that when you save it generates all the sizes and puts them in a folder. That part works fine. I don't get how you are supposed to propagate your artwork from the 1024x1024 section to the other areas of the template. I don't think you have to do it manually.
I also don't see the ideal way to place your art inside the template roundrect - I'm currently selecting it with the magic wand and doing "paste into" which works, but doesn't seem ideal.
It seems most Sketch and XD templates and libraries have been recently updated (and extended) but the page has been available for many years... featuring design resources for current OS and product versions.
The Internet Archive shows Photoshop, Sketch, and XD templates going back to at least June 2017 [1]. I definitely remember using the Photoshop icon templates in 2019.
> Your use of Symbols obtained from Apple’s SF Font is limited to creating mock-ups of user interfaces for software products running on Apple’s iOS, iPadOS, macOS and tvOS operating systems and your use of Symbols obtained from Apple’s SF Compact Font is limited to creating mock-ups of user interfaces for software products running on Apple’s iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS operating systems.
Nope. SF Symbols is quite useful (for native apps). There are libraries of things like ISO symbols, though. Here's one that I have used: https://github.com/tabler/tabler-icons
The whole point of it is basically to make designing with SwiftUI easier for more people by making it visual and block-based. You can get the Apple look and use the real elements themselves, rendered live on your device, without writing code.
Would love any feedback, especially from anyone who is getting a lot of out these design resources or Sketch and Figma!