Vesper Open Source

Brent Simmons:

It’s presented as a historical artifact rather than as a living project. It’s definitely not an example of how to write apps these days — and it’s not even an example of how to write apps in 2013. […]

It was written while iOS 6 was current, and it still looks like an iOS 6 app under the hood. But, at the same time, we were anticipating iOS 7, and so Vesper was an art project — we wanted Vesper to join Letterpress and Twitterrific and a few others as one of the first Modernist apps.

But we hadn’t actually seen iOS 7, and so we invented Vesper’s look and feel from scratch, though with some idea of where the puck was heading. That — combined with wanting to use Ideal Sans everywhere, even in standard things like alerts — meant we had to do a ton of custom UI and animations.

It’s interesting to me that 2013 was about the last time you could plausibly think that that’s the right thing to do. It’s clearly too expensive now — and was too expensive then, too, but we hadn’t realized it yet.

The irony is that we thought Vesper was one of the first apps of a new era — the era that officially kicked-off with iOS 7 — but, in the end, it was one of the last apps of the era where it was not uncommon for developers to spend massive amounts of time in UI invention.

That last point is so true.

★ Wednesday, 21 December 2016