We’re back this week with some fresh pixels and resources ready to be served to you on our Platter. Your feedback to our previous editions has been fantastic and it is always great to read through your emails. Our social timelines continue to be filled with discussions about iOS 7, Apple’s new direction of design and what it all means. Since everyone is keeping a keen eye on when the next beta of iOS 7 lands and is generally very excited about iOS 7, we decided to include a few more developer and designer resources in this platter. We hope you like them.
Soaring
Soaring is a nice weather app for iPhone with some great weather sounds. It has a lovely cartoon style animated background and the temperature and weather conditions displayed at the bottom in a very light font weight. In the evening and night the moon has a star pendulum that is also animated. The app does just that. The weather can be tweeted and the sounds can be switched off if needed. The settings allows changing unit of temperature and display mode. The app is currently available free on the App Store.
Highly Visual 2.0
Almost three years after Milind first wrote about Highly Visual, version 2.0 of the apphas been released on the App Store. Highly Visual, as the name suggests, is a very visual way of
reading
browsing through your feeds. It puts the images in the articles front and center, thus offering a quick way to browse through your feeds. When you first launch the app, you can choose what topics you are most interested in and it’ll auto-populate some feeds for you. Of course, you can add your own feeds as well. The new version has a redesigned interface with an improved grid view and is now a Universal app. You can grab Highly Visual from the App Store for $2.99.
Building Track 8 — An App Case Study
We’ve sung high praises for Track 8, the “Metro” inspired music player app for iPhone and iPad. While originally available only for the iPad, Ender Labs later worked on making it a universal app, making it available to iPhone users while still maintaining its lovely UX and features. The team has now released an iBook that journeys you through building Track 8. There’s a lot of insight in the book, along with lessons that were learnt. Not only does the book talk about the design & development of Track 8, but also what it was like to handle its PR & marketing. If you’re an app designer or developer, you definitely want to read this. Building Track 8 is available for the iPad at $1.99 on the iBookstore.
Requester – HTTP Requester for iOS
This one’s for all the devs who subscribe to BP. Requester is a really simple & elegant looking iPhone app to test HTTP requests. It gives you a quick and easy way to test requests to a public API, server or a website. It helps you with GET, POST, PUT and DELETE requests and you can even type in custom headers if you want. I love the UI and it’s a nifty utility to have in your pocket. Requester is $0.99 on the App Store and chances are, you probably already have it on your iPhone.
We’d like to thank our sponsors Squarespace for sponsoring our RSS feed this week.
PortKit: UX Metaphor Equivalents for iOS & Android
With more and more apps finally going to Android after being on iOS for a while, designers and developers have to learn and work with design guidelines on both platforms. iOS 7 will launch this fall and Android has been getting better with each version. PortKit is a great reference for how standard elements look across iOS 6, iOS 7 and Android 4.x. The guide is so great that there are links to developer resources for almost all the elements and even PSDs to work with. PortKit will be your quintessential tool while designing apps across platforms.
iOS App Icon Template
The famous iOS icon template by Michael Flarup has been updated for the new icon size and radius requirements in iOS 7. The template makes life much easier letting you just work with the largest size and have it rendered to the smaller sizes automatically with a photoshop action. You need photoshop CS2 and above to work with the template. The template is available for free here.
iOS 7 GUI PSD
Geoff Teehan and Jon Lax have always created great iOS GUI PSDs. They just released a new PSD for iOS 7 beta 1 and will continue to update it as the beta progresses. The PSD is brilliantly organised with labeled layers and all editable shapes. We think this is a great start and can’t wait to see how it progresses as iOS 7 does over the next few months.
In case you missed the announcement, you can now use your credit card directly to sign up for our membership. The payments are now securely processed via Stripe, so you no longer need a PayPal account. Come support your favorite site and interact with other members in our community forums.
Know a website, app or something else that would look great on next week’s Platter? Let us know!
Write — A Beautiful Notes app for iPhone & iPad.