Linked List: June 7, 2014

Saturday, 7 June 2014

Pixate 

My thanks to Pixate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Pixate has created a new mobile interaction design tool that is now in private beta. It lets you visually design interactive interfaces and animations that run natively on your device, without any code or complexity.

Follow the link and check out the short demo video they’ve created. It’s really, really impressive. It lets designers create the feel of an interface, instead of just the look of it. Seriously, just watch the video, then sign up for early access at pixate.com.

Brent Simmons on Swift 

Brent Simmons:

I’m lucky. I’ve just started a Mac app, and I plan to write it in Swift.

I’ve heard other developers say they want to wait about a year, and I totally understand that attitude. It’s reasonable to assume that Swift code written today may not compile in a few months — it’s a work in progress.

But my thinking is this: if I start using it now, I can provide feedback, and that feedback will help shape the programming language that I’m likely to use for the rest of my career. Maybe I’ll have a ton of feedback, and maybe I’ll have none — but I’d sure hate to have missed my chance to help.

We came into WWDC thinking we might have to approach Vesper for Mac with a new UI design sensibility. We came out thinking we should write it with a new programming language.

Debug: WWDC 2014 Developer Roundtable 

Speaking of WWDC podcasts, the new episode of Debug is just terrific:

Matt Drance of Bookhouse Software, Ryan Nielsen of Tumult, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater, and Jason Snell of Macworld join Guy and Rene to talk about Apple’s WWDC 2014 keynote — the Swift programming language, Extensibility, CloudKit, Metal, and more.