Brandon Walkin: Recent Episodes
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Xcode is a fantastic development environment for developing Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications. But it has some areas for improvement. In this post, I’ll explore some improvements to how documentation and autocompletion is integrated into the development workflow and how Xcode could provide specialized interfaces for working with system frameworks. There are two primary use […]
iTunes 9 was released a couple weeks ago with a significant number of user interface changes. It’s always interesting to look at the direction that’s taken with the iTunes UI because it’s often used as a testing bed for future iterations of the Mac OS X user interface. I thought it would be fun to […]
Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed. I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. […]
BWToolkit 1.2 is out with three new additions along with other improvements and fixes. The first addition is a gradient box which lets you draw a rectangle with a gradient or solid color. It also has optional border and inset lines. The next addition is a styled text field which lets you apply a gradient […]
I’m pleased to announce that BWToolkit 1.1 is now available for download with a brand new split view. The new BWSplitView has three main features: Subview autosizing: In the inspector, the developer can tell the split view which subviews should resize with the window and which should remain at a fixed size. The standard behavior […]
BWToolkit 1.0.2 is now out with some added functionality. The selectable toolbar has some new methods for setting its selected item, which is useful if you want to display the window with a certain tab selected, or want to select a certain tab from within another tab. You specify which item should be selected by […]
Update: BWToolkit now has its own website. BWToolkit is a BSD licensed plugin for Interface Builder 3 that contains commonly used UI elements and other useful objects. Using these objects is as simple as dragging them from the library to your canvas or document window. When I first heard about the plugin architecture in IB […]