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53 posts total
Lickability

Here’s our design critique of the Image Playgrounds icons 🧵👇

Two Image Playground app icons, one from iOS 18.2 Beta 1 and the other from WWDC24. They're mostly the same (with a dark background and an iridescent orb), but the generated animal has slightly larger eyes and a more pronounced snoot in the iOS 18 version.
Lickability

📣 Ahh, it’s release day!

📲 We worked with our pals at @revenuecat to build an official iOS app to help developers manage their subscription business and monitor metrics from anywhere.

👇Watch the video from @charliemchapman and download the app on the App Store.

lickability.com/blog/revenueca

Lickability

🧵📐 Let’s talk about optical centering and visual balance in UI design. This post has been making the rounds about iOS 18’s flashlight Live Activity, and it’s probably time we have The Talk.

About precision vs perception in interface design, that is.

A screenshot of a tweet from a user called "TheAppleDesign" posted on September 20, 2024. The tweet says "iOS 18 new flashlight is not in center. Miss you Jony Ive & Steve Jobs." It includes three screenshots of the iOS 18 flashlight with gridlines to show that it's off-center.
Lickability

Some users have pointed out that the flashlight icon in the Live Activity isn’t mathematically centered. At first glance, this might seem like an oversight. But this is a deliberate choice, rooted in centuries-old design principles.

The iOS 18 Flashlight live activity. Vertical gridlines are drawn on either edge of the flashlight icon, with another gridline running down the exact middle of the screen, labeled "true center of device." The flashlight is slightly nudged over to the left of the "true center."
Lickability

We use excellent third-party libraries in our iOS development work all the time—so we wanted to give some love to our favorites.

Read on to find out more about the UI libraries that help us do what we do best: lickability.com/blog/ui-librar

Lickability

Remember the Playstation 3?

Our resident Playstation expert @bcapps recreated its famous “waves” background with a Metal shader on iOS!

Lickability

Say 👋 to our brand new brand!

Inspired by our 15+ years of history, and looking to our future, we decided it was time for a fresh coat of paint…

A red circle with a playful smile icon surrounded by the word "Lickability." Colorful shapes are in the background, and one of them has the text "Allow us to (re) introduce ourselves"
Lickability

we don’t ask for permissions right on first launch. we wait our turn, present the prompts when the user wants the feature. very demure, very mindful, very classy

Lickability

📰 Excited to see our designer @samhenrigold’s work for @Mastodon’s new built-in bylines getting so much recognition! Empowering journalists across the fediverse with clear attribution. Read more about this important update on @verge.

theverge.com/2024/7/2/24191049

Lickability

that shit* go hard

*WWDC 2015 Session 412: Auto Layout Techniques
in Interface Builder

Lickability

Welcome back! This is our fourth design critique thread. Today, we're taking a #ThrowbackThursday look at iPhoto for iOS, launched in 2012. Despite its short lifespan, it delivered visual design craftsmanship in spades.

Three iPads (3rd generation) running iPhoto. One is displaying a photo journal with a virtual cotton texture background and images arranged in an asymmetric bento box grid. The middle iPad is in album view; each album is displayed as a linen-clad binder sitting on a green-tinted glass shelf. The third iPad is editing a photo, boosting its saturation.
Lickability

To properly understand this app, we have to set the stage:

1. The iPad was brand new when iPhoto for iOS came out — March 2012. Less than two years after it launched. Apple was still producing tons of glossy iPad apps to position the iPad as a capable — but more personal — computing device. So in this time, we saw iPad versions of their most popular apps.

Joachim Bondo

@lickability, in your research for this – once again – great thread, did you come across WWDC 2012 Session 243 “iPhoto for iOS – UI Progression and Animation Design”? (Could be where you have the graphics from.) Of the countless dub-dub videos I've seen, both live and on video, this stands out as one of the very best. Mind-blowing work! archive.org/details/wwdc-2012-

Lickability

do not look directly at #Eclipse without eye protection (night shift + dark mode)

A screenshot of the Eclipse IDE in light mode with many panes and scrollbars
Lickability

🧵 Well well well, if it isn’t another design critique thread! This week, we’re taking a look at the Quirks and Features™ of the Apple Journal app.

A graphic of the Journal app icon under an x-ray, with design grid lines running through it.
Lickability

In case you’re not familiar, the core app flow is quite simple. There are three main screens:

1. The timeline, where your entries are sorted reverse chronologically. This is where you start.
2. Journal suggestions (after you tap the floating Add button)
3. Edit entry

Three screenshots of the Journal app. From left to right: Timeline view, which is a reverse chronological list of entries displayed as cards. Journal suggestions, which is a modal sheet with mixed pieces of media you may want to journal about (photo collections, a workout, a prompt, someone you’ve texted recently with). Edit entry, which is another modal sheet. The attachments are laid out in a grid above a freeform text field.
Lickability

⏰🥄 It’s Soft Serve o’clock! Check your inbox for the latest from us:

mailchi.mp/2ad53a9c287f/introd

Lickability

Design Friends, our monthly-ish meetup for designers & developers, is tonight in NYC! If you’re reading this, you’re invited.

partiful.com/e/tsyHlSHkxbIQsQR

Lickability

🧵 In our designs, we’ll often create this type of view where text is overlaid on top of an image. If the images are dynamically loaded, you might run into legibility issues. We’ve been around the block a few times, here’s how we solve it:

Four images with white text overlaid on top. The top row of images, labeled “Before,” has significant readability problems. The text disappears into light spots of the image, the letterforms get lost in areas of extreme contrast. The bottom row, labeled “After,” are the same two examples but legibility modifications are applied to make the text easy to read.
Lickability

We’re showing this in Figma, but this can be easily done wherever you’re building UI.

The view is made up of two layers: the image and the text layer. Both layers are the same size.

A photo of autumn foliage in a box labeled “Image”. On top of it, a box labeled “Text” contains the headline “Connecticut Autumn” and sub headline “How to emotionally prepare yourself”. The text box background is mostly transparent, except for a slight black-to-transparent gradient.
Lickability

🧵🎙️ Yesterday, Apple released the transcripts feature for Apple Podcasts. This reminded us to revisit the UI of the Podcasts app, and we’d love to share some of our findings. We’re just focusing on the player since there’s a ton to cover.

A live-view transcript of a podcast episode titled “The Mystery of Beauty” from the podcast “Hidden Brain” is shown in Apple Podcasts on iPhone 15 Pro.
Lickability

First, in case you haven’t tried the transcripts feature, here’s what it looks like. There are four states the transcript viewer can be in:

1. Playing (transcript synchronized)
2. Scrolling
3. Paused
4. Hidden

Lickability

🐘✨ Hyped to see some of our latest work for @Mastodon featured in TechCrunch! If you have an Android phone, download the app to check out the fun QR codes @samhenrigold designed.

techcrunch.com/2024/02/28/mast

Lickability

🗳️ Since y’all seemed to like our design breakdown of the Apple Sports app last week, we’d love to do more. Which app would you like us to look at next?

mastodon.social/@lickability/1

Anonymous poll

Poll

Journal
0
0%
Podcasts
0
0%
Translate
0
0%
Something else (reply!)
0
0%
0 people voted.
Voting ended 5 Mar 2024 at 20:19.
Lickability

this was us in a conference room watching the SOTU last summer, slowly realizing SwiftData was just Core Data in a fake mustache (if you even care)

the sad hamster meme, but it’s in a wework conference room watching the State of the union keynote on the TV
Григорий Клюшников

And SwiftUI is actually just an abstraction over UIKit and AppKit 👀

Lickability

🧵👇 Last week, Apple did a surprise announcement of Apple Sports, a new app for sports fans. We do internal design critiques quite often, but we noticed a few things worth mentioning for designers and developers thinking about modern iOS design practices.

Screenshot of the Apple Sports app
Lickability

This app remixes stock UI components in really interesting ways. We once heard someone say, “design your app for the current iOS version + 1.” So with that lens, we’ve been looking at what the design of Apple Sports can tell us about iOS 18.

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