iOS & macOS designer / Swift Engineer. Lover of small details. 9 years designing at Apple, 5 on Xcode team.
San Francisco, CA
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“To be a good designer you must be a good engineer in every sense: curious, inquisitive.”
— Charles Eames
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Funny, someone posted a picture exactly the same as this a year ago on Reddit: teddit.net/r/oddcombos/comme…
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After 9 years, today was my last day at Apple. It's been an incredible journey. 5 of those years I spent at Xcode and it's changed my life. I made a little video with some of my favorite features and things I helped with!
So long, and thanks for all the Swift!
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Little reminder for WWDC. Be kind with your criticisms. There’s a human behind everything you see.
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I hereby raise a challenge to any 3D artist to correctly recreate the app store icon based on the Instruments icon mesh - and show a 360 rotation of it. It's surprising, and as you can see, not sticks. I can't share the source, but I can reward the winner with a like and retweet.
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This is where I design Xcode and Simulator from 🔨💙
ALT Picture of a home office space, with a view to the San Jose Convention Center.
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This is about the route that girl took on the intro video. She must be new at Apple Park - I probably took similar routes in my first week here.
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In Xcode 14, if you select a block of text and type {, it embeds the block in a closure and puts the cursor in the beginning of the closure so you can define it. Works great for SwiftUI!.
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I always forget you can ⌘ click anything in an unfocused window to interact with it without switching your active window focus.
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Me: what do you think of this quick little design I made?
Engineer: Nice. But what if the user is offline, has accessibility type on, is on landscape, is Russian but in Brazil, has a broken thumb, is holding a martini on the other hand while running from a pack of wolves?
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Credit to Mr @ChristianSelig for coming up with a hedgehog for the medium speed icon. I love making cute SF symbols!
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In iOS 13 you can now set your cornerRadius to continuous corners (aka squircle or superEllipse). Just set MyUIView.layer.cornerCurve = .continuous
And it's animatable too! So no more ugly corners!
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This is what the sticks are… app icons seen from the side: nitter.app/marcedwards/status/127…
Old instruments icon actually had the mesh that matched it.
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I love this subject! As usual, I think the answer is to do it optically if you want precision. When you do it metrically, it can create the optical illusion that a ball rolling through the gutter would get stuck on the curve, even though it wouldn't.
Stupid nerd post incoming. This is a pet peeve from my days designing interfaces.
You need to add the margin to the outer curve of a screen to make the rounded corner effect look right.
The inner curve "might" be mathematically correct on the Surface Laptop screen if you go by the top margin. But since the side margins are thinner it looks wrong. You can't pull off a elegant rounded corner with inconsistent top and side margins.
I would have either made the side margins thicker or the top margin smaller so they are equal so the rounded corner effect looked correct. They designed themselves into a lose-lose situation.
I see this on android phones all the time. Thinness of bezels is placed above visual consistency. iPhone side bezels are wider than other phones, but they are more visually consistent and in my opinion look much better.
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Bad take. I had to travel to see my dying dad and be with my family in his funeral. I shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for that.
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I’m still pretty proud of the logo and the intro animation I made for the launch of SwiftData!
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Also, we actually did this with the Xcode / dev tools icons. These circles are all the same size. The inner border has more curvature than it would following the innerBorderRadius = outerBorderRadius - padding rule, to account for that optical illusion.
I love this subject! As usual, I think the answer is to do it optically if you want precision. When you do it metrically, it can create the optical illusion that a ball rolling through the gutter would get stuck on the curve, even though it wouldn't.
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All these colors have a 3:1 WCAG Contrast Ratio. But clearly they are not all equally easy to read.
On the right I have the experimental SAPC Contrast Ratio, which comes much closer to measuring the different readability of these labels.
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macOS 11 can now programmatically generate document icons. You just define a center image, background image and the text as a string and the rest is done for you! You can download the Sketch and Photoshop templates on developer.apple.com/design/r…
ALT macOS Document icon template for Sketch
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I'm likely 20 years late to the party, but today I learned that selecting a word and hitting ⌘E will add it to the search field, so you can just ⌘G from there. I've literally been doing ⌘C, ⌘F, ⌘V ⌘G all of my life. Works in Xcode and most text editors.
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Made a thought bubble typing indicator that morphs into a message bubble. Built in SwiftUI with Canvas metaballs.
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Not sure what you’re looking for… but there are also things like qtips, which are a brand that became the name of the thing even when it’s not actually a qtip brand.
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This is what non-continuous curves look like in 3D and why Apple never uses them. There's a harsh visible line between the corner and the flat part.
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What you get when a designer turns programmer. I assign SF Symbols to all my files. I find it easier to look for the icon I want than remember the name of the file.
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I am afraid of being disbarred from being a developer. But I just added icons to the names of all my files - much easier to find them in a sea of orange birds!
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This is a 30 minute crash course on UX Design, teaching the same principles we use at Apple to design great apps. Worth watching no matter your level of expertise. developer.apple.com/wwdc21/1…
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What an incredible year! Every icon, every checkbox, every hairline and every color you see has an insane amount of work and consideration from several people behind it. Nothing is done lightly, just as it should be. Congrats to everyone, it's been an honor being a part of it! ❤️
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Live Previews in Xcode 11 also works for UIKit files. It means you no longer need to build, run and navigate to the screen to validate the changes you made!
My awesome colleagues @neightchan and @antonvlad show you how in this mind-blowing presentation: developer.apple.com/videos/p…
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OMG! Biden signed an executive order banning the use of the letter X as the glyph in close buttons!!!
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The sample code for the Fruta app is now available for download. It's our biggest sample app yet! developer.apple.com/document…
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If you type something from a framework that's not imported, Xcode will recognize it and offer to import it for you:
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Beautiful display for the pride watch band exclusive to the Apple Park Visitor Center.
ALT A display for the Apple Watch pride band made of multi colored threads woven in a large circle.
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Since joining the Xcode team I have worked longer from home than I have worked in the office. I’m super sick of this tbh. I want to see people, I want to have lunch with them, I want to white board ideas, I want to chat in the kitchen, and I want to dress up!
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And there are always reasons behind everything we do, and it’s often not “we didn’t think about it”.
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Fun fact: We ended up creating 2 versions of every Placeholder icon in Swift Playgrounds, a normal and an inverted because simply tinting the icon looked wrong.... 🧵
Fun fact: I designed and implemented this sheet in Swift Playgrounds as an app project! I handed it off to @chrisbroughart as design spec & first-pass implementation and he integrated it into the real app, what an awesome workflow!
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I love seeing my SwiftData logo in the wild. I explored a lot of options for it but this was my very first idea and the one that ultimately stuck - a blend of the Swift logo with database cylinders. This is the intro animation I made for it for the SOTU announcement.
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There are a lot of different document icons for common file types to make it easier to spot your different files by shape and color:
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What’s your favorite transition animation on any app on iOS? Send screen recordings if possible 😄
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📢 Developer and designer friends, show me your SwiftUI / UIKit / AppKit animations! Can be something simple, or complex like chained and multi layer - can be a single view, or transition between views, interactive (following a gesture) or standalone. 🙏
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My take on the Xcode icon:
• Though it's against the new aesthetics, a 3D glass hammer looks better imo
• Keep the 30º rotation
• Bring back the outer line that's so emblematic of dev tools, and helps retain the illusion that the hammer is still floating beyond the bounds
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My first app, @Progress, is now live on the App Store! Six months in the making... threw 3 MacBooks out my window, learned a ton and had a lot of fun making cool interactions! Link below…
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Working in Xcode is often quite a trip. I'm currently using breakpoints to debug breakpoints.
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If you ⌘ click on the view debugger icon in Xcode’s debug bar while it’s in the background, it’ll invoke view debugger without switching focus to Xcode.
This is actually a macOS feature. ⌘ click on any unfocused window takes the click without switching focus.
A neat thing that AFAIK you can only do with a Touch Bar is debugging view hierarchies of transient views (things like menus or popovers that disappear when you click outside or switch apps). Super handy when working on a menu bar extra
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A little gem in the latest Xcode: you’ll no longer be nagged, ahem, warned about unchanged variables and unused constants while you’re still in the middle of coding. Those warnings will only show up when you build. 🙌🏻
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I’m obsessed with little improvements to code completion and the Xcode source editor. This year I pushed for auto indentation on closing a closure, improvements to completing functions that have default values, and more… 👇🏻
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Added a little ticker animation to the weight viewer at the top. Is it too much? Or the right amount of fun?
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One of the features I'm proud to have helped with this year!
Learn how to design and implement the new Big Sur document icons: developer.apple.com/news/?id…
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Interface Builder now has accessibility overrides - so you don't have to run your app to test for many accessibility settings:
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I became an American citizen today! 🇺🇸🇺🇸
I'll now get to vote for this to become the new national anthem!
piped.video/watch?v=KtJJC0nW…
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Another little Xcode tip. Holding ⌘ while hovering on the Minimap shows you all your symbols and you can quickly navigate to them.
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I’ve been using SwiftUI as a way to prototype interactions. Takes a little longer but you just can’t match this level of fedility with any GUI based prototyping tools. Added bonus: it can serve as basis for the engineer to implement it for real!
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What's New in Xcode 15 is out! Super exciting new features like improved code completion, previews, testing, staging support, a new bookmarks navigator! developer.apple.com/wwdc23/1…
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And here’s another example where we do this in iOS, with the Voice Memos App icon. Notes, Reminders and Safari all have pixel hinted icons for every resolution because of those fine lines.
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One UI technique I don't hear about much is called Progressive Reduction. It means that as users get familiar with an app, the interface simplifies, removing or minimizing elements that are no longer needed.
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While taking a screenshot, press space to map it exactly to a window, then hold ⌘ to map it to a sheet or popover and exclude the rest of the window
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“The misery index is calculated from the unemployment rate, the lending rate, and the inflation rate minus the percent change in real GDP per capita of a country.”
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X Da Tech
PSA for all SwiftUI bloggers and YouTubers: I redesigned the SwiftUI logo two years ago and I still see the old one around. Here’s the latest:
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The HIG for the new Mac Document icons is out! ❤️ developer.apple.com/design/h…
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My team at Apple is hiring!! If you're a designer who's also passionate about programming and tools, this is an amazing opportunity! DM if you wanna learn more. jobs.apple.com/en-us/details…
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The fathers of SwiftUI left Apple and are working on a new project together to create native apps in with phone just through prompting! Super impressive technology!
Do you have plans this weekend? You do now. We're opening up a few more spots in the Bitrig TestFlight! Join now to build native Swift apps, just by chatting with AI. #Swift #SwiftUI #BuildInPublic testflight.apple.com/join/Ck…
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One of the interactions I'm most proud of is the photo taking experience... In order to ensure your phone is in the same position, the shutter button also functions as a level indicator.
I'm also using Vision to create an outline of your previous photo for perfect alignment.
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Creating a new file got a whole lot easier in Xcode 16. Just go to File > New Empty File and it automatically creates a Swift file by default, or you can choose the extension or any plain text file.
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My niece swapped her iPhone for a Samsung because BTS advertised it. Or should I say my ex-niece?
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Nothing in our hardware design is an accident. They are extremely meticulous. My guess is that someone decided that optically this looked more right than having it metrically perfect.
The inset white line in the Xcode icon is also not metrically aligned for that reason.
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Did you know you can append : and the line number after a file name to open that file on that line using Open Quickly? So type ViewController:12 and it opens it in line 12! 🤯
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Spending 80+ hours working on replacing an old, impossible to follow code base from generations ago. Yet when it comes out next year, people will look at the visual result and just go “oh that’s nice little change”or maybe they won’t even notice. But I notice and I like it. 💁🏻♂️
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