Issue 165

26^th September 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So I missed the pre-orders but managed to pick up a Plus for myself yesterday. Why the Plus? I spent some time at the store with both models before making my purchase and if I’m completely honest, the Plus is simply too big for my taste. I mainly used my 5s one handed and while it’s just about possible for me to type on the Plus keyboard one handed, I have abandoned hope of ever reaching that opposite corner button.

So why did I get one? Well, mainly because I just couldn’t justify not using one. With the adaptive UI (and 3x to a lesser extent), I feel like not having a Plus as my primary phone would almost be irresponsible! Yes, we have access to simulators but there is no alternative to every day, real world use of a device to make you really think about how UI can and should work on this significantly larger display.

Now, does anyone know how where I can buy one of these? 😎

Dave Verwer

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News

Apple are reporting 46% while MixPanel are coming in at a little less with 35%. My guess at the reason for this is probably because Apple’s figures are based off newly purchased apps, rather than existing app usage. Either way, it’s off to a strong start again but just like last year I expect adoption to slow significantly now as all of us early adopters are surely upgraded by now.

Tools

Even if you don’t want to solve this exact problem, this incredible answer by Rob Mayoff to a Stack Overflow question is worth a read. This is an excellent, practical guide to many of the non-trivial aspects of configuring layout constraints.

Code

Essential reading from Mathew Sanders on adaptive UI and size classes in iOS 8. If you haven’t dug into this topic already then you really need to start right now! This is a wonderfully detailed post which you’ll need some time to read properly, but it’s worth it.

There were a flood of keyboard apps released last week and it turns out they mostly needed users to go and switch on “Full Access”. With the limitations on memory usage for custom keyboards, it’s likely that developers will need to keep some functionality in the companion app associated with the keyboard. I appreciate that custom keyboards are at 1.0 right now but the wording presented to the user, requiring instructions like those in this article make me feel like this needs a little more work at the OS level.

With every release of iOS I keep expecting MapKit to include some kind of annotation clustering functionality, but until it’s added we’re on our own. Luckily, Filip Bec has taken the work by Thoughtbot which I linked to back in Issue 119 and extended it to create FBAnnotationClustering.

Design

Scott Hurff with an outstanding post on the implications of the new screen sizes on app design. I also really liked Jared Sinclair’s article this week on the same topic.

Reading this post felt like getting a sneak peek over the shoulder of Marc Edwards during a design session. He talks about everything from dealing with 3x (and 2x, naturally!), how he does various styling effects, sub pixel nudging and so much more.

Want to mock up some Watch UI’s? This PSD should give you both the inspiration and the recourses to work with by reproducing most of the UI that we’ve seen from the watch so far in easily editable layers. Go crazy!

Videos

Fascinating video from the @Scale conference recently of various Facebook engineers talking about the internals of their various apps. It’s hard to imagine the challenges of working with datasets that are as big as Facebook’s so this is a rare chance to take a peek at some of the solutions they have come up with.

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And finally...

I know I didn’t manage to score even one point before I uninstalled it! 😡