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Lickability

This is super easy to configure by the way, asset catalogs in Xcode have you covered:

19 comments
Lickability

Back to Journal, let’s start with the editor. We’ve seen this pattern a lot — a keyboard toolbar that summons other sheets. This is an elegant implementation: the toolbar stretches to the bottom and the keyboard sits on top.

Lickability

When a sheet appears, it swaps place with the keyboard. The toolbar never changes position; the sheets are always the same size as the keyboard. Compare this to the X/Twitter composer, where the Add Media gallery is full-screened. Use modals sparingly!

Lickability

Speaking of things you’ve seen before, take a look at what happens when you remove items from the attachment grid. It’s fairly similar to what you’d see on X, but they animate between layouts here, which is always a nice touch.

Lickability

You can record audio and attach them to entries like this. The pulse animation doesn’t respond to amplitude or anything fun, but at least it gets turned off if the Reduce Motion accessibility setting is enabled!

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One last thing here: Journal never asks for full photo library permissions, it just uses an inline system photo picker. And when an app uses it, the system provides a little animation to let you know the app doesn’t have full access to your library: developer.apple.com/videos/pla

Lickability

Take a look at the date picker in the editor view, this is so weird:

• Why does it appear in a pseudo-action sheet?
• Why are both buttons emphasized?
• It stretches, for some undetermined reason. Is this a fidget feature?? We can’t figure out why they did this. Theories?

Lickability

While we’re talking about weirdness, let’s read the nav bar to absolute filth. Ahem:

• Why can you preemptively bookmark an entry? Is the expectation that you’ll write an entry, think “this one is a banger,” and bookmark before you even finish it?
• How is bookmarking more important than cancelling a draft?
• Under the More menu, the option to discard the draft is called Delete. It’s technically correct, but it rubs me the wrong way. You haven’t saved anything yet — there’s nothing to delete.

Lickability

Here’s our proposal: Get rid of the bookmark button. Move discard to its rightful place, as a cancel button on the leading edge. The nav title is already the date, so we can make this a button to change the date. We’ll give that a slight background as a hint to it being editable.

Lickability replied to Lickability

Alright, enough about the editor. Let’s get to that gorgeous, lickable timeline.

We actually got an early look back at WWDC of an earlier timeline concept. Which version do you prefer? 🤔

Lickability replied to Lickability

The timeline is this really nice card-style interface with a branded gradient in the background. In light mode, it’s quite subtle. In dark mode, it’s really 🅱️oppin’. Very good gradient, 9/10.

Lickability replied to Lickability

For the longest time, Apple’s guidance was to avoid Android-y floating action buttons (FABs) like the plague. But it seems they’re slowly coming around to them? We love to see it.

Lickability replied to Lickability

Taking a closer look at that footer, you’ll notice the variable blur effect. This has been showing up in a TON of first-party apps.

Achieving this effect is quite difficult. There’s nothing in Figma that lets you do this and the API to do this is private (for now) 😕

Lickability replied to Lickability

Some people mimic this by making a blurred overlay and gradient masking it, but that creates a nasty halo effect when you dim the opacity of a blur layer. It’s not worth it, don’t do it.

(By the way, we created this graphic using
Janum Trivedi’s VariableBlurView. Very fun to play with but not App Store-safe!!)

github.com/jtrivedi/VariableBl

Lickability replied to Lickability

Here’s another common pattern that’s highly polished here: the media grid. You’d normally see this in a social media timeline, but we love the nested corner radius the grid items, how inner corners are sharper, and how items delightfully spring in and out of the light box view.

Lickability replied to Lickability

When you scroll in the timeline, there’s some interesting behavior with the nav bar title — it collapses to the leading edge rather than the center. The stock nav bar, with centered text and trailing buttons, looks a bit lopsided; this is a nice fix!

twitter.com/SebJVidal/status/1

Lickability replied to Lickability

Next: card swipe actions. This rounded style is hard to replicate with public APIs, especially SwiftUI List. Most people give up and write a custom implementation, which is a shame since you relinquish a lot of accessibility features when you do that.

Lickability replied to Lickability

Apple uses a few private swipe action styles — circular in Mail, or round-rects in Weather. Seb Vidal is taking one for the team by attempting to get his swizzled implementation through App Review.

Godspeed, soldier 🫡

twitter.com/SebJVidal/status/1

Lickability replied to Lickability

Thanks for following along! Hope you enjoyed this peek into our own design journal. 📓😊

CausticMango replied to Lickability

@lickability You may love to see it, but I deeply dislike them. It’s disappointing to see Apple start using them, too.

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