How to create natural gestures and animations on iOS — At WWDC 2018, Apple designers presented a talk titled “Designing Fluid Interfaces”, explaining the design reasoning behind the gestural interface of iPhone X. It’s my favorite WWDC talk ever—I highly recommend it. The talk provided some technical guidance, which is exceptional for a design…

Five simple techniques to learn how other apps are built — The Medium iOS app is a native app with a fake navigation bar and the Product Hunt app is built with React Native. How do I know? Unless I wrote the code myself or asked the developers who…

How Designers Can Help Prevent Visual Glitches in iOS Apps — With the release of iOS 11, there was widespread concern that Apple’s software quality was declining. Many users experienced performance issues, software bugs, and visual glitches. Here’s an example of a visual glitch in the Messages app, caused by force-touching to “pop” a message followed immediately by tapping the back…

Exploring rendering differences between Sketch and iOS — Spot The Difference Can you spot the differences between these two images? If you look hard enough, you might notice a few subtle differences: The image on the right: Has a larger shadow. Has a darker gradient. Has the word “in” on the top line of the paragraph. The image on the left…

I noticed an unusual behavior of the iPhone X home indicator while working on my most recent app. The app’s background near the home indicator is purple. When the app launches, the home indicator is very light gray. But something odd happened when I pressed the app’s “share” button, which…

Swift is an incredibly expressive and powerful programming language. We’re going to explore some of Swift’s language features that can make your code easier to read. Better Buttons Let’s take a look at a common iOS pattern that prints a message when a button is pressed. If you’ve done any iOS…

Creating a popup menu with UIViewPropertyAnimator — Animations are key to a quality user experience. They serve a wide variety of purposes, including directing user attention and connecting user actions to results on screen. Animations make the experience of your app unique — they can enable a level of…