Dribbble; iPad Mini; Finding UIAppearance stuff

Things like this make me love Dribbble.

I want to encourage some good App.net apps.

Here’s a bunch of images as a starter kit. If you do something interesting with them and need some more, please get in touch (I don’t have that much spare time, but you never know).

Dribbble is a community for designers, to allow them to show of what they are working on. Usually, it's a small bitmap (400x400), but they can attach larger images or other files if needed. The small size makes it easy to show something, without giving away what they are doing on a sensitive project.

There is also the concept of a rebound, where someone else can take the design and rework it, and have a proper discovery of "this is a rework of that, what do you think?".

As a non-designer, I can't sign up (well, I can, but there'd be no point). But I can register as a viewer. I wish I could comment, but I'll settle for "liking" stuff.

I follow (and it pops up in Google Reader via RSS) some of the FreeAgent people (Chris, Roan, Robbie), Phil from Xero, and various other people.

Thanks, Marc from Bjango. Posting stuff like this is great for inspiration.

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So. The new iPad Mini is out (kinda).

  • I like the idea of the size, but I want to try one before buying it (as a replacement for my iPad2). I have a bit of trouble seeing smaller text on the Nexus 7 screen, and as I use my iPad a lot more than any other device, I need to be able to read it easily.
  • They kept the 1024x768 screen resolution. Thank you, Apple.
  • As Nathan pointed out to me, this is going to ROCK for schools and early childhood education. It's smaller, for small hands. It's cheaper (the price in NZ is better than the price in the UK), but it still packs a huge amount of power.

It's still too expensive to be a definitive game changer, but it's a long way towards that.

The 13" Retina Macbook Pro looks interesting, too. I've had a few 13" MBP's in the past, and it's always been my favourite size for a laptop - except the tiny screen resolution. The Air mostly fixed that, and this does so even more. 1680 wide on a 13" screen is a sweet spot for me, but having just bought a 15" rMBP, I'm not going to be upgrading for a few years.

And who knows what Apple will have then.

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@GregMunn on the Xamarin Forums asked how to discover what UIAppearance properties a class has. After a bit of a google around, its quite easy:

{% codeblock %}

cd /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS6.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/Headers/

grep -H UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR ./* | sed 's/ __OSX_AVAILABLE_STARTING(__MAC_NA,__IPHONE_5_0) UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR;//'

{% endcodeblock %}

This shows all properties which have UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR in them, which are the ones you can customise. Sadly, the one he wanted (UITextField) doesn't.

Nic Wise

Nic Wise

Auckland, NZ