Unread Version 1.2 Launches April 21st
The next update of Unread for iPhone is going to be a huge one. Tons of new features and fixes. Check back here on Monday April 21st for a complete list of what’s new.
Introducing Friday App Design Reviews
Starting next Friday, I will be posting a new weekly feature here on this blog: Friday App Design Reviews. I’m really excited about this.
If you’re an independent iOS developer (like me), or your team is interested in an experienced outsider’s opinion, let me know about your app.1 Every week I’ll choose an interesting submission and share detailed, constructive criticism in the form of long blog post (like this one, but more detailed, and with screenshots).
If you’d prefer a formal, private design review I am available for that as well. I’ll charge you a fair price based on the scope of the project. Public blog post reviews are free of charge.
Either way, shoot me an email with the details about your app. I won’t be able to review every submission, so be sure to help me understand how your app will be interesting to other readers of this blog.
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You can submit someone else’s app, too, if it’s available for sale on the US App Store. ↩
Recap of My Recent Github Goodies
Under the influence of Bryan Irace, an iOS engineer at Tumblr, I’ve open-sourced a lot of handy iOS utilities lately. These are all polished, single-purpose units of code which should be cake to drop into your projects.
JTSImageViewController is like a “light box” for iOS. It’s similar to image viewers you may have seen in apps like Twitter, Tweetbot, and others. It presents an image in a full-screen interactive view. Users can pan and zoom, and use Tweetbot-style dynamic gestures to dismiss it with a fun flick. Don’t force your users to learn yet another set of gestures. Tweetbot’s are the best and should become the canonical reference.
JTSCursorMovement adds convenient gesture recognizers to a UITextView that make it easy to move the cursor forward or backward. Use one finger to move by characters, two fingers by words, and three fingers by paragraphs. JTSCursorMovement works with both plain text and attributed text, and with composed characters like emoji. I use this in all my apps. I wish every app used it.
JTSSmartPunctuation replaces common shorthands composed of dumb punctuation with their smart counterparts. It turns dumb quotes into smart quotes, three consecutive periods into an elipsis, three consecutive dashes into an em-dash, and two consecutive dashes followed by anything but a dash with an en-dash. It’s compatible with right-to-left languages and safe to use with composed character sequences, like emoji. It only scans the immediate vicinity around recent edits, so it should perform well even with very long runs of text.
JTSSemanticReload is a category method on UITableViewController for calling “reloadData” while preserving semantic content offset. Many times you don’t want to use an animated table view update, but you do want to insert new rows above the current content offset. The problem with using reloadData is that it loses the user’s current place in the content. In these situations, use the JTSSemanticReload category instead.
Free Kickstarter Idea: Inkjet Typewriter
About ten years ago I experimented with doing all my personal writing on a used electronic typewriter. Although the experiment was a success, it had one crippling drawback; ink ribbons were consumed much faster than I was expecting, and were hard to replace. Only certain stores carried them. It led me to wonder if a product like this could be possible:
An Inkjet Typewriter
What if instead of obsolete typewriter ribbons, you could refill your typewriter using generic ink jet cartridges? Imagine a slim keyboard, like the Apple Wireless Keyboard, with a carriage-roll portion along the back edge, housing an ink jet write head. It would lay down one letter at a time, with a soft whish. It would be thin and portable, perfect for writing anywhere. And since it uses inkjet cartridges, buying refills would be as easy as a quick walk to the drug store.
Perhaps you could have an alternate version that’s just the carriage roll, which would connect to any Bluetooth-enabled keyboard. Either way, if you see an LCD display, they blew it.
If anyone is so inclined to make this thing a reality, I’d happily consult on the project, free of charge, as long as I get one for myself.
Designing Unread for iPad Part 4 – The One Screen I'm Sure About
There’s one screen design in Unread for iPad which I’ve been sure about since the beginning:
Click to see full resolution.
The margins and other measurements are subject to final tweaks, but this is what the article view is going to be. The rest of the app’s hierarchy should make this screen feel right at home.