I’ve met a lot of smart people as a result. I really had no idea what I was doing when I wrote the first few Bjango articles, but I’m so glad I did. So, we get to help the community, but we help ourselves at the same time.Īnd, if there’s something I’m not doing well, others might let me know. The Bjango app icon templates we’ve released are of a higher standard than when we just used them internally. The same goes for open source projects - the quality usually has to be higher than projects you’d keep to yourself, so it motivates you to aim higher. Writing is a great way to learn, because I typically have do some research to ensure what I’m publishing is correct. I just like being part of the conversation. What drives you to share so many of your secrets? You have built up a loyal following via Twitter and your blog. Overall, I think the way we work is optimal. Working this way means Asset Catalogs are more of a hinderance than help, so we typically don ’t use them. That means the developers don’t need to do anything, unless asset sizes change, or new assets are added. We usually have mockups on the main or a separate Git repo, too. I send complete sets of assets to the developer, or I commit assets directly to the project’s Git repo. What’s your process for sharing designs and assets with developers? I occasionally use Principle and Flinto for prototyping, and both are brilliant. If nothing else, it seems like a waste for me to ask a talented developer to spent time on menial tasks I could do myself. My programming skills are weak, but it’s pretty easy to dive in and change colours or animation timing or other things. I also use Cheetah 3D a bit for app icons and other elements that require a bit of dimension.Īnd, I use Xcode. Automated asset exporting is handled by some Photoshop actions, scripts and Hazel. The bulk of my work is done in Illustrator and Photoshop. I really enjoy being as close to the development as possible. When designing mobile apps, what does your toolset look like? I tried a bunch of things - hacks, scripts, actions - and ultimately decided that it would only be solvable properly if we built an entire visual design tool from the ground up, so it could be a design IDE, rather than a place to draw things. Problems with my workflow became apparent and I had to reassess everything from the perspective of a world where multiple pixel density targets are common. The inflection point was mid 2010, when the iPhone 4 was released with a Retina display. I think it’s possible other designers and developers agree, but my number one motivation is to build something I am happy using for the remainder of my working days. I hopefully have a few decades left in me as a software designer, our current tools are utterly broken, and I feel they’re heading in the wrong direction. What lead you to make tools for designers? Now you’re concentrating on design tools like Skala, Skala Color and Skala Preview. The topic was discussed for weeks, and we even settled on discontinuing it a few times, but we eventually chose to spend the time on developing iStat Menus 3. Our choice was between ceasing all development, or go all-in and change it to a paid product. iStat Menus is a complex project and it required a large amount of effort to maintain. In 2010 we released iStat Menus 3, which was a huge decision for us. The iPhone was an amazing breakthrough at the time, so we bought some first gen iPhones from the US, and started working on iOS apps as soon as we could. The OS X and iPhone Weather app were almost an identical design. They looked a lot like Dashboard Widgets. In 2007, Apple announced the iPhone, which ran “apps”. Dashboard Widgets are mostly based on web tech, which makes them more approachable, but we eventually found ourselves looking to do things that weren’t possible as Widgets and moved over to creating native Mac software. iStat Pro was frequently #1 in Apple’s Widget charts, which an easier feat than doing the same on the App Store, but we were proud of it. They were released for free because we were just messing around, and we didn’t want the responsibility - as soon as you ask for money, I feel that you also must offer a decent level of support and maintenance. We started making Dashboard Widgets back in early 2005, when they launched as a new feature in OS X 10.4 Tiger. Can you give us a rundown on Bjango’s history? Hey Marc, Bjango has been making apps for a long time.
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