iOS app from sketch to App Store
Hi, Habr. I work as a leading designer in the studio. I share a story about my first application, which I not only designed and designed, but went through all the steps to release on my own.
Caution: The article is illustrated with large animated images.
If you are a designer without a distinct programming experience, the first launch of Xcode will remind you of the first launch of the 3D editor. It is not clear how to approach, where to start. This site-book Design + Code helped me a lot. It is written by a designer for designers. The author uses the Sketch + Xcode bundle and focuses on prototyping. Confusion over the look of Xcode will pass after one or two chapters. At the same time, if you didn’t know why Sketch is so good, you will find out pretty quickly.
In addition to the famous export of graphics in several resolutions directly from the layout, Sketch has another very useful feature. Coordinate systems and units of measure up to text tracking are the same as in Xcode.
')
Why at all designer to deal with programming? The pros are pretty weighty:
The article is just about one such project: the tracker drunk water.
The App Store is full of water trackers. The trick of the functional is very different. Probably, many will like to take into account the type of liquid, although I can hardly imagine that someone sitting in a bar would drive every glass of beer into the counter. I was thinking about a completely different scenario: about the very Lentiansky. I am sure that very few people want to go through three screens of the application after each cup of tea. But this does not mean that such people do not care about their own health. Health cares for everyone who wants to live long and happy. My application is made for people who want to become a little healthier by cultivating a new habit in themselves - drinking the daily rate of water.
Of course, the interface is evil and someday smart medical gadgets themselves will consider the balance of substances in the body, but if you stay within an iOS application, the laziest scenario assumes the following:
Everything is very simple. To add water in one tap, you need to take several popular volumes and make them separate buttons on the main screen. Perhaps there is no reason to deeply disassemble the design of the interface of such an application.
Is that one moment missed: it is terribly boring . I drank water - I recorded it, I drank water - I recorded it, I drank water - I recorded it. My lazy target user will get bored on the first day. So you need to do is not boring, but do not complicate. It's about water. The solution is to revive the water.
All versions of pre-prepared animation are not suitable here. Need living water, not annoying. Water should react to the movement of the device, so that the application can be played a little bit. So you need a little physics. The first thing that comes to mind is particles. Many particles interacting with each other. But the drawbacks are obvious right away: in order for such water to look decent, you will have to eat a lot of resources. This is quite reasonable in games and is not allowed for an application that has a digit plus.
An interesting implementation met in this article . For me, only the idea of ​​springs is relevant: in order to simulate a two-dimensional cut of the surface of the water, it can be interpreted as a set of vertical springs.
In my case, the device’s accelerometer and tapas on the buttons for adding water act as a source of external force. The vertical axis of the accelerometer is the force itself. It is distributed along the springs depending on the horizontal axis. Further I drew UIBezierPath on an array of springs. It turns out a funny effect. Though he is far from realism, but the problem is completely solved.
iOS 8 brought along Today widgets. Apple absolutely logically recommends there to display the actual data and the simplest actions. This is just my case. The same five buttons and two lines of information. And the task "do not run the application every time" is completed.
But there is a much better place to place the controller than the Today-panel. Apple just by the way announced a watch. The task "Do not run the application" has evolved into "Do not get the phone."
The current design capabilities of UI in WatchKit are similar to tetris. Almost everything is limited. But as long as there is no device, there is no way to test the result. So it is reasonable to keep all the most standard. Besides, I again need five buttons and two lines.
The App Store does not yet allow you to download applications with WatchKit Extension, but the release of WaterCheck is ready and, I hope, the version will be released with the start of sales of Apple Watch.
Many were surprised to learn that among the nutritional data broken down by molecules in the HealthKit there is nothing about water. Perhaps there are good reasons for this, but I preferred to take advantage of this.
The app now looks like part of Apple Health. The author of the icon is my colleague Vadim Matveev.
Epic fail: Once, after experimenting with the price of the application, we received several thousand installations from the USA. Following we got a decent bunch of negative reviews for one reason: I forgot about the localization of units. In the US, as you know, almost everyone uses ounces.
Many users are not rigidly fixed standard volumes. But it is important for me to keep the maximum simplicity. The solution is gestures. Refine the added value by pulling any button up.
Of course, this method increases the likelihood of random or inaccurate actions, so you need to do undo. According to the Apple Guideline, the standard gesture for cancellation is to shake the device. So I did.
For owners of non-standard dishes, I made an in-app with settings for input buttons. In the latest updates, the application learned how to collect history and show it in a graph. The graph appears when you rotate the screen.
In the next article, I will write about application marketing, about successful and unsuccessful application promotion.
Caution: The article is illustrated with large animated images.
If you are a designer without a distinct programming experience, the first launch of Xcode will remind you of the first launch of the 3D editor. It is not clear how to approach, where to start. This site-book Design + Code helped me a lot. It is written by a designer for designers. The author uses the Sketch + Xcode bundle and focuses on prototyping. Confusion over the look of Xcode will pass after one or two chapters. At the same time, if you didn’t know why Sketch is so good, you will find out pretty quickly.
In addition to the famous export of graphics in several resolutions directly from the layout, Sketch has another very useful feature. Coordinate systems and units of measure up to text tracking are the same as in Xcode.
')
Why at all designer to deal with programming? The pros are pretty weighty:
- Really common language with the developers
- Prototyping and mocap with unlimited possibilities
- Small projects can be developed from sketch to appstore alone.
The article is just about one such project: the tracker drunk water.
Another water tracker
The App Store is full of water trackers. The trick of the functional is very different. Probably, many will like to take into account the type of liquid, although I can hardly imagine that someone sitting in a bar would drive every glass of beer into the counter. I was thinking about a completely different scenario: about the very Lentiansky. I am sure that very few people want to go through three screens of the application after each cup of tea. But this does not mean that such people do not care about their own health. Health cares for everyone who wants to live long and happy. My application is made for people who want to become a little healthier by cultivating a new habit in themselves - drinking the daily rate of water.
Of course, the interface is evil and someday smart medical gadgets themselves will consider the balance of substances in the body, but if you stay within an iOS application, the laziest scenario assumes the following:
- You can not do more than one tap to "drink" something.
- Ideally, the application does not need to run at all for this.
- The application should regularly remind to drink.
- If necessary, adjust the daily rate, the period and the interval of notifications and automatic reset of the counter.
Everything is very simple. To add water in one tap, you need to take several popular volumes and make them separate buttons on the main screen. Perhaps there is no reason to deeply disassemble the design of the interface of such an application.
Is that one moment missed: it is terribly boring . I drank water - I recorded it, I drank water - I recorded it, I drank water - I recorded it. My lazy target user will get bored on the first day. So you need to do is not boring, but do not complicate. It's about water. The solution is to revive the water.
Living water
All versions of pre-prepared animation are not suitable here. Need living water, not annoying. Water should react to the movement of the device, so that the application can be played a little bit. So you need a little physics. The first thing that comes to mind is particles. Many particles interacting with each other. But the drawbacks are obvious right away: in order for such water to look decent, you will have to eat a lot of resources. This is quite reasonable in games and is not allowed for an application that has a digit plus.
An interesting implementation met in this article . For me, only the idea of ​​springs is relevant: in order to simulate a two-dimensional cut of the surface of the water, it can be interpreted as a set of vertical springs.
In my case, the device’s accelerometer and tapas on the buttons for adding water act as a source of external force. The vertical axis of the accelerometer is the force itself. It is distributed along the springs depending on the horizontal axis. Further I drew UIBezierPath on an array of springs. It turns out a funny effect. Though he is far from realism, but the problem is completely solved.
Do not run the application
iOS 8 brought along Today widgets. Apple absolutely logically recommends there to display the actual data and the simplest actions. This is just my case. The same five buttons and two lines of information. And the task "do not run the application every time" is completed.
But there is a much better place to place the controller than the Today-panel. Apple just by the way announced a watch. The task "Do not run the application" has evolved into "Do not get the phone."
Do not get the phone
The current design capabilities of UI in WatchKit are similar to tetris. Almost everything is limited. But as long as there is no device, there is no way to test the result. So it is reasonable to keep all the most standard. Besides, I again need five buttons and two lines.
The App Store does not yet allow you to download applications with WatchKit Extension, but the release of WaterCheck is ready and, I hope, the version will be released with the start of sales of Apple Watch.
Icon
Many were surprised to learn that among the nutritional data broken down by molecules in the HealthKit there is nothing about water. Perhaps there are good reasons for this, but I preferred to take advantage of this.
The app now looks like part of Apple Health. The author of the icon is my colleague Vadim Matveev.
Support
Epic fail: Once, after experimenting with the price of the application, we received several thousand installations from the USA. Following we got a decent bunch of negative reviews for one reason: I forgot about the localization of units. In the US, as you know, almost everyone uses ounces.
Many users are not rigidly fixed standard volumes. But it is important for me to keep the maximum simplicity. The solution is gestures. Refine the added value by pulling any button up.
Of course, this method increases the likelihood of random or inaccurate actions, so you need to do undo. According to the Apple Guideline, the standard gesture for cancellation is to shake the device. So I did.
For owners of non-standard dishes, I made an in-app with settings for input buttons. In the latest updates, the application learned how to collect history and show it in a graph. The graph appears when you rotate the screen.
In the next article, I will write about application marketing, about successful and unsuccessful application promotion.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/254287/
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