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Design Tools News #37

Apple’s yearly developers conference was last week, and it was for the first time completely online.
Design Tools News #37
By Roy  • Issue #37 • View online
Apple’s yearly developers conference was last week, and it was for the first time completely online. There were some cool announcements like the switch to ARM processors for Mac, enabling a much smoother way to develop apps across all of Apple’s platforms in the future. But as a fan of all things SwiftUI, I was delighted to see great updates there as well! You can catch up on some cool in-depth sessions ranging from the new iOS widgets, to designing for the iPads pointer capabilities. The quality of the entire production of the conference was off the charts, and I’d recommend you to check out the highlights!
To follow along with what is capable in the latest SwiftUI, I’d recommend you to follow Meng To, Paul Hudson, and Jordan Singer on Twitter. Jordan shares a lot of code examples, and writes a great newsletter on the things he builds. If you’re really into learning SwiftUI, I also recommend checking out Hacking with Swift by Paul.
Of course there was more happening besides WWDC… I’ve selected another 6 resources for you to check out!

Design for the iPadOS pointer — WWDC 2020
This is a really great video on how Apple’s design team approached designing the iPadOS pointer to complement touch input.
In this 40 minute session you’ll learn how to bring the power of the pointer to an iPad app: customize and refine pointer interactions, how to select pointer effects and design pointer shapes, integrate trackpad gestures, and keyboard modifiers. Recommended material on many levels!
developer.apple.com  •  Share
SF Symbols 2 — Icons for all Apple’s platforms
With now over 2,400 configurable symbols, SF Symbols is designed to be used on Apple platforms starting this fall when macOS Big Sur launches. It integrates with the San Francisco system font, and now offers more categories, right-to-left localization, and multi-color glyphs! Download the beta app to check them out.
developer.apple.com  •  Share
Meng To
Matched Geometry Effect + Lazy Grid is so smooth in SwiftUI. Made it work with scrollable content. https://t.co/k5Wh7kUb3Q
Jordan Singer
I want to show you just how easy it is to recreate this Control Center widget in SwiftUI with interaction, animations, and all using a Swift Playground.

Thread 👇 https://t.co/0yESCvLZPj
Uicard — A Pocket Friendly Wireframing Ruler
I’m really not great at sketching quick wireframes on paper. But Uicard is definitely gonna help me with that whenever I need to. It’s like a Swiss army knife for UI sketching that comes in the size of a credit card! There are multiple cards, for whatever early stage design task you’re up against. It’s now on Kickstarter, and there are still early bird tiers available. It’s very close to reaching its goal, so go and support this project!
www.kickstarter.com  •  Share
PliimPRO — Quickly toggle settings for a clean screen sharing experience
This is a really simple tool for Mac, that makes your screen look uncluttered and gets rid of other distractions when you want to start a screen sharing session. Just toggle it and you’re ready to go, without closing apps, turning off notifications or moving your windows. Toggle it off and you have your desktop exactly where you’ve left off.
pliim.app  •  Share
Layer Outer — Design a layout, and save it as a .sketch document on your iPad or even iPhone
Yes, it actually allows you to edit or create a new Sketch document right from your iPhone or iPad! It’s in a fairly early stage, but it’s so impressive that this is now possible and I cannot wait to see where this is going.
www.funfocus.app  •  Share
Sketch Map Generator 4
This has been one of my favorite Sketch plugins. Whenever I need a map in my design, it’s truly the best way to generate it using the Google Maps or Mapbox API with Sketch Map Generator. It allows custom styling, as well as an interactive map experience to zoom and crop the view however you need it.
twitter.com  •  Share
Good Annotations — Web based annotation tool
I regularly annotate screenshots. I find it essential when working remote. CleanShot X is my go-to tool for this, but in case you’re looking for a free(mium) and online tool, give goodannotations.com a try. You can highlight any image area, add shapes and arrows, and make them standout out with browser mockups or borders.
www.goodannotations.com  •  Share
Pose Animator — Animate a 2D vector illustration with your cam
A pretty cool demo of animating a vector illustration using your own camera feed! Pose Animator uses PoseNet and FaceMesh to animate curves in real-time. It borrows the idea of skeleton-based animation from computer graphics and applies it to vector characters.
www.producthunt.com  •  Share
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Roy
By Roy

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