00:00:22 ◼ ► And there's a couple of things that I think are worth considering as I've been diving into this
00:00:28 ◼ ► and, of course, as you've been diving into this with your app redesigns, two major kind of themes.
00:00:47 ◼ ► And then I've also, you know, one kind of sentiment I've seen around is as people have used this design more
00:01:07 ◼ ► There's always been like a strong kind of motivation for developers to adopt Apple's look and feel by default.
00:01:14 ◼ ► You know, it was always like, well, if you want to have something, you know, more custom, you can theme it yourself.
00:01:21 ◼ ► But ideally, you should use Apple's defaults if you don't really know, you know, like rules of grammar.
00:01:31 ◼ ► And with Liquid Glass and this redesign, Apple has set a pretty strong opinion forward.
00:01:37 ◼ ► I think for the first time in a while, they set a really strong opinion forward of this is how apps should look.
00:01:43 ◼ ► And if you look around the system, there's a couple of, you know, kind of, I would almost say templates.
00:01:47 ◼ ► You know, you have like the tab bar structure and many, many apps now have the tab bar structure.
00:01:52 ◼ ► Then you have kind of like, you know, like the full screen with control blobs in the corners.
00:02:02 ◼ ► The conventional wisdom of like, you should follow these probably, I think it's worth diving into when you should follow them, when you should not follow them, and how you choose, if you're going to follow them, which ones to follow.
00:02:17 ◼ ► And I think it's probably an interesting conversation just in the sense of like, I, so I've basically finished my Pedometer++ first draft redesign at this point.
00:02:27 ◼ ► Like, I've gone through the entire app from, you know, every screen of it now has been liquid glassified and updated and adjusted to it.
00:02:34 ◼ ► And my process for that has been very much, I look for inspiration on the system apps for any question I have.
00:02:50 ◼ ► And I think that's motivated largely from this position of, like, I don't have time to invent something novel and interesting that will fit in with the new design pattern in the next few weeks.
00:03:05 ◼ ► You know, like I was doing the math today and it was sort of slightly terrifying me that I think I have basically seven working weeks left of the summer.
00:03:13 ◼ ► To get things done and with a little bit of holiday in there, so maybe closer to six weeks of actual working time.
00:03:20 ◼ ► Like, I don't have time to be wildly doing the sort of the speculative, exploratory, prototyping lots of different ideas and things.
00:03:29 ◼ ► It's like I'm taking the approach of saying, you know, if an Apple version of this exists, I'm going to try and copy that.
00:03:35 ◼ ► Because they've had the benefit of rather than trying to do this in eight weeks, they're doing, you know, they've had at least a couple of years probably that they've been iterating and trying different things.
00:03:45 ◼ ► And so if they've settled on a pattern, that's probably going to be good enough for me.
00:03:49 ◼ ► But it is definitely tricky because I'm, you know, no app that I, it's like, if no app that I, that, you know, part of my app is exactly the same as one of Apple's apps.
00:04:05 ◼ ► And so those, I can look at Apple Maps and sort of draw inspiration, but I'm still having to interpret that and find ways in which that applies to me that is different than it applies, you know, to a general purpose navigation tool that isn't climbing, isn't hiking specific and doesn't have all the other features and the benefits.
00:04:23 ◼ ► And so I, it's interpretation, but it's still kind of, I have to make, make guesses about that.
00:04:30 ◼ ► And I think we are, and depending on how closely you can find, you know, something that exists, then you can do that interpretation.
00:04:37 ◼ ► But often there's the question, yeah, it's like, there's the question you're asking in some ways of when should you try and follow that away?
00:04:44 ◼ ► And I think the other question of, it's like, what do you do if there is, you know, you have a feature or a screen or something for which there is no example.
00:04:50 ◼ ► And even there, like within Apple's apps, not all of them do the same screen the same way with the same look or the same structure.
00:05:00 ◼ ► And so it's not as straightforward as even just copying something you, you have to individually kind of decide.
00:05:06 ◼ ► And you're doing this all with such limited experience with the new design and the new designs changing all the time.
00:05:15 ◼ ► And I think my hope right now is just like, I'm taking this approach of, I'm viewing my early designs as first drafts.
00:05:21 ◼ ► I'm going to try and go through my apps, get a draft implementation of a very straightforward version of something.
00:05:27 ◼ ► And then my hope is that sort of I'll be able to loop back to those towards the end of the summer when hopefully the betas have settled down.
00:05:34 ◼ ► I'll feel confident to have the, you know, once we get into the public beta phase, I'll probably be at that point putting it on my main phone so I can be living in it day in and day out rather than now.
00:05:45 ◼ ► It's only on a testing phone for me because I'm trying to be wise about that and don't want to completely destroy my new phone.
00:06:01 ◼ ► So I haven't quite gotten to the point where I can live with it, Dave, you know, full time, day to day.
00:06:10 ◼ ► And I'm trying to read, like I've, there's like three WDC videos, like the introduction to liquid glass, the making a SwiftUI app with liquid glass.
00:06:18 ◼ ► And there's another technical one about the design that I've just probably watched like five times.
00:06:26 ◼ ► Like I'm just trying to amess myself into this is like sort of how quickly can I speed run an understanding of this.
00:06:32 ◼ ► But in the absence of understanding, all I have is copying, which is not the strongest position to be in as a designer.
00:06:39 ◼ ► I think it's also very obvious that Apple themselves are also speed running this to some degree, like that, that this is, you know, this is very much a, you know, it's, it's coming in hot.
00:07:00 ◼ ► I will say, though, you know, for developers, especially for if you are in charge of the design of how the app looks and works and functions and is structured.
00:07:24 ◼ ► And beta three, they really have fixed most of the very badness of it, including the intense heat.
00:07:45 ◼ ► You will understand, you know, what is, what are the, because like you'll see it, you know, when it's on a test phone.
00:07:55 ◼ ► So I don't really, I don't really experience the new OS when it's just on a test device.
00:08:00 ◼ ► When it's on your main device, you are seeing so many different nooks and crannies of that design.
00:08:06 ◼ ► You're seeing like, you know, how does it work not only in, you know, the, the kind of headlining apps, mail, music, you know, like the, like the, you know, the big system, not, you know, Safari.
00:08:15 ◼ ► You can see that on a test phone, you know, if you poke around here or there, but when it was, when it's in your main phone, you're seeing things like, how does the alarm look?
00:08:23 ◼ ► How does it work with like, you know, the, the control panels and like the, you know, the, the settings apps and how does, you know, how does like this random, you know, weather widget that I like, there's so many little things that like little edges of the system that you will just not see on a test device unless you are an amazing QA person who can poke around like that, which I cannot.
00:08:42 ◼ ► So this is the time because to really understand like which of these interaction paradigms and which of these kind of, you know, Apple templates, so, you know, so to speak, which of these make sense for your app, I think you need to experience, you know, some time using all of them.
00:08:59 ◼ ► And the, the best way to do that is to use this, to use it on your main phone because you'll be forced to.
00:09:04 ◼ ► And beta three, I wouldn't recommend this for like, you know, civilians, but for developers, it's fine.
00:09:11 ◼ ► So that being said, I, I think as I have tried to figure out like, you know, what do I do for overcast?
00:09:21 ◼ ► It didn't seem like it made a lot of sense for overcast because in the past tab bars have historically been like three to five sections that you would tab between.
00:09:32 ◼ ► Um, and they, it tends to, it tended to discourage like drilling down into things, you know, navigationally or showing a lot of modals.
00:09:42 ◼ ► It's a navigation stack where you drill into things and then a giant modal now playing screen.
00:09:50 ◼ ► I think it's now the right pattern because the new tab bar, like if you look at Apple's own apps, all of their, you know, their media apps, look at music, look at podcasts.
00:10:03 ◼ ► They use that structure that it's a tab bar because, and they've, they've had this cool, like, you know, the mini player blob that floats above the tab bar.
00:10:25 ◼ ► If I use that design, integrating search into it is much, much easier because it's like, it's literally built in.
00:10:31 ◼ ► Um, so they, they've made a bunch of things about it much easier and structurally, I think it works best when there's like two or three tabs at most, you know, plus search.
00:10:44 ◼ ► Like there's, because they've kind of crammed search in and because it collapses down when you scroll into one button on the left, like there's really not a lot of space or, you know, breathing room there for more tabs.
00:10:58 ◼ ► So I'm like, well, if I kind of restructure overcast into like home podcasts and explore or something like that, you know, like, you know, home podcasts and director, you know, whatever it is like something like that, then that fits pretty well in the tab bar design.
00:11:15 ◼ ► This is how media apps work on, you know, most of my users, you know, it's, you might think that my, my competitors are like, you know, pocket cast cash or whatever.
00:11:26 ◼ ► They're off in the woods, who knows what they're doing, but Apple is very clear with what they are doing.
00:11:35 ◼ ► And so if I want my customers to feel that this is like, you know, pretty familiar, I should adopt apples.
00:11:48 ◼ ► If my app looks exactly like Apple's apps, like if you make a mail app and it looks just like Apple mail, is that bad?
00:12:08 ◼ ► And, and I don't really, I don't quite know every time, like, you know, what, whether I'm making the right call or not.
00:12:14 ◼ ► But I think ultimately what I usually end up doing is usually end up closer than not to Apple's looks and Apple's structures.
00:12:28 ◼ ► And I think there's this funny, like, almost like bet you have to make with a choice like that, where you're saying, if you try, like you, in your case, like it is the, the, it's the very interesting position of like Overcast has a almost, not quite feature for feature, but very close to feature for feature.
00:13:18 ◼ ► Ideal new user, someone who's coming to Overcast, are they going to feel comfortable if it's similar to the app that they've most recently been using?
00:13:46 ◼ ► It's like, you're making the, like the, are you, are you, you know, you're making go, it's like the stock trading, what it's like the long or the short position.
00:13:52 ◼ ► Are you taking the short position that people are going to hate the new design in podcasts and you're going to be a breath of fresh air if you go the other way?
00:14:03 ◼ ► And I think that tension or like that sort of the degree to which you're, you're, you're matching, um, I mean, it's one of those things.
00:14:11 ◼ ► And I think so many times I've had to make that kind of a choice, um, in my, in my career as a, as an app developer.
00:14:16 ◼ ► And I think it's easy, I think, to be, to, to think that the kind of the short position, you look at this, you know, you hear a controversy about it or whatever, but, um, it's like betting against the platform, betting against that the, you know, that the Apple is committed to a direction, um, seems broadly to be something that's going to be come back to bite you.
00:14:40 ◼ ► That it's going to be something that would be, um, more like if, at best, if you're the counter alternative to something like that feels very short lived position and not something that's very sustainable and it's not something that it's like you're, you're fighting against the tooling, um, while you do that, like the most remarkable thing, um, that's been really nice.
00:15:02 ◼ ► Most of the redesign work that I've been doing, um, is essentially me just deleting code that I was previously using and watch in iOS 18.
00:15:12 ◼ ► I was customizing the, the system controls and the system styles and doing all these things to kind of like, you know, bend Swift UI to my will in a way, because I had a very, I had a particular mentality that I was trying to do.
00:15:26 ◼ ► And I was always fighting something or always tweaking something and it was inevitably leading to trouble.
00:15:30 ◼ ► The no current version of pedometer plus plus uses only system button styles, uses only system controls, except for one.
00:15:38 ◼ ► I made a custom segmented controller because you can't tend segmented controllers for some reason.
00:15:43 ◼ ► Um, as far as I can tell, as far as I can tell, you can't still tend segmented control.
00:15:48 ◼ ► So I made my own segmented control, but all it's trying to do is look like, it's like, it's looking like the system one as much as I can make it, but, um, you know, with tint, because that's the way it looks better in my app, I think.
00:15:58 ◼ ► But I've been doing this and it's been, I will say, it's been making this process very fluid, very straightforward.
00:16:04 ◼ ► It took me a lot less time to do the pedometer plus plus full redesign than I expected, because mostly I'm just saying, you know what, if it's good enough for the system, it's good enough for me.
00:16:16 ◼ ► And so if liquid glass goes over great and people are happy about it and my customers are happy, then awesome.
00:16:22 ◼ ► Like I'm in the pound seats then like everything's wonderful and, um, it works well for me.
00:16:29 ◼ ► But at the same time, like if people don't like the new design, um, like I guess they're going to go to Android.
00:16:36 ◼ ► Like, cause it's the reality is, is even if my app is different and went in a different direction or took a different structure or did different layout or didn't like the, the tab bar that collapses and expands or these things that, you know, these system features that are going to be, the system is pushing you towards using, um, like that doesn't seem like a great place to be.
00:16:58 ◼ ► It doesn't feel very sustainable or something that's going to have longevity that I'm just going to be constantly fighting against, um, the tooling rather than just embracing it.
00:17:06 ◼ ► And I think as a small, you know, sort of on the, like you think about Spotify or someone like that, like their whole app is a whole different thing.
00:17:20 ◼ ► They're going in the, like the, you know, at the, the Spotify app looks the same on the web, on Android, on iOS, on a Mac, like it's the same app.
00:17:31 ◼ ► And that makes, I think a lot of sense if you have a very big, broad, broad app, but I don't think for either for you or I,
00:17:41 ◼ ► And so the approach I'm generally taking is to just be like the most iOS-ified I can possibly be.
00:17:47 ◼ ► Um, I want like the best example of the new design as I can possibly come up with and just embracing that.
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00:19:23 ◼ ► Like, if you want to serve people who don't like the redesign or if you don't like the redesign yourself or both,
00:19:37 ◼ ► And we don't, you know, we can, we can basically offer feedback, literally, but, you know,
00:19:44 ◼ ► we can offer feedback and we can, we can try to persuade gently to maybe slightly tweak the direction of things.
00:19:53 ◼ ► But when they want to do something big, it's going to happen to us, whether we like it or not.
00:20:11 ◼ ► And you could have made a market briefly, you know, being the app that didn't adopt the new design and being all, you know, iOS 60, you could do that.
00:20:19 ◼ ► But your app started to look old on day one and it was a pretty minimal, minimal and marginalized market to appeal to within maybe a few months at most.
00:20:36 ◼ ► Unless you are really, really good and have you really, your own really, really good design.
00:20:42 ◼ ► And odds are you don't like you might if, you know, God bless you if you're out there, but like you probably don't, you know, let's, let's be honest.
00:20:55 ◼ ► It is much better to embrace the tidal wave that's coming, you know, whatever the, whatever the metaphor is, jump into it, jump over it.
00:21:07 ◼ ► Embrace the wave, know it's coming and, you know, try to, try to work with it because that's the market.
00:21:14 ◼ ► And every single day that goes by after this is released, there's going to be more and more people who just consider this.
00:21:21 ◼ ► And if your app doesn't look like that, it's going to look old and, or cheap or bad or, you know, broken.
00:21:26 ◼ ► I also think like when deciding how much of the system look to adopt versus how much to customize, you know, you mentioned that you're stripping out tons of customization and kind of going with system look and, you know, a lot of controls and everything.
00:21:49 ◼ ► In the era of iOS 7, there was the big stark bomb drop at the beginning, but over time, they just, it just came to represent less and less.
00:22:24 ◼ ► And so the more you deviate from that, like I feel like when, when there is an unstyled look, like iOS 7 era look, you are kind of left to customize more of it.
00:22:34 ◼ ► You, you're expected to customize more of it and your app will look better the more of it you do customize.
00:22:38 ◼ ► But if, if there is a strong brand new theme, like there is now, the more you customize and the more you deviate from it, it actually might backfire on you.
00:22:49 ◼ ► It actually might make your app look worse or it might make it look old because you're trying to apply, you know, last year's design techniques to this year's design, or you are by customizing it, maybe you are stripping away some of the cool default look that people will think is cool for a while.
00:23:03 ◼ ► And I think the time will come in this design era that, that is kind of, you know, kicking off this year, this, this stage of Apple design, the time will come when more customization will be in fashion and will be advisable.
00:23:15 ◼ ► But right now on like, you know, minute zero of this design, I think less customization and going into the system design is the better move because that's what is cool.
00:23:32 ◼ ► So if you embrace that design, you will also be part of the tidal wave that is cool and fresh.
00:23:39 ◼ ► But again, those people are going to be marginalized over time because this is what's happening to the platform.
00:23:54 ◼ ► There's something I was recently thinking about that I am used taking advantage of the, this change to shift blame onto Apple for choices.
00:24:07 ◼ ► Um, it's been an interesting part of this process too, that I think this change is big and meaningful.
00:24:17 ◼ ► This sort of, I think the way that a lot of users are going to, you know, sort of react and fair enough.
00:24:23 ◼ ► Um, Apple is, is driving this, but I was, as I've been doing some redesigns, like I'm not talking about the visual redesign parts where there's some things that are, you know, I'm trying to be very just sort of built in.
00:24:32 ◼ ► But there's, as I'm going through my app screen by screen, which is just a wonderful opportunity to revisit my, you know, sort of user experience and, you know, information architecture and all the kind of, whatever are those designy words you want to use for how the Apple works.
00:24:47 ◼ ► And I'm finding things where it's like, Oh, you know, after like a year or two on from when I first built this feature, I think I have a better way to structure this.
00:24:57 ◼ ► And usually I'm very reluctant to like move things in the app because anytime you move anything, it's going to annoy some people and the trade-off and the balance of that can be really awkward.
00:25:09 ◼ ► That's like, is it worth doing this thing in a way that I think is, you know, 10% better, but, um, would require shifting a button from one screen to another.
00:25:21 ◼ ► Do you need to use tip kits to tell people where the new button is or however you want to do that?
00:25:26 ◼ ► Um, but one of the nice things about sort of very embracing the system design is a lot of, I think those kinds of changes that I'm now making, like I'm moving a bunch of features from one place that I didn't really make sense or it wasn't really getting used.
00:25:43 ◼ ► And I think in some ways it's like you get a, I'm listening to somebody, this is the way I'm, I'm viewing it anyway.
00:25:49 ◼ ► Like I get this free pass to fix a bunch of stuff that I should fix in some ways in general, but fixing it would have been awkward.
00:25:58 ◼ ► And it's like, if you're going to jumble everything up anyway, and it's going to look very different and it's all going to be kind of across the system.
00:26:08 ◼ ► And so I think it's been really helpful to embrace the system design, to give cover in some ways to some of these other restructurings and redesigns and things that I'm doing.
00:26:16 ◼ ► Um, because I think it's going to be, users are going to need to relearn the app regardless.
00:26:23 ◼ ► Like they're going to have to, there's going to be a period where they're going to need to read, you know, acquaintance, become more acquaintance with the app again.
00:26:31 ◼ ► And so as part of that, I have this wonderful opportunity to write the wrongs of two or three years ago when I didn't, you know, have the benefit of a couple of years of actual using of the app or further of, you know, the classic one is who you design a feature with a particular set of features in mind.
00:26:51 ◼ ► Suddenly your architect, you know, it's like the classic example of like you've run out of tabs.
00:26:58 ◼ ► Like this situation is something that always happens, but this is a great opportunity to come in and clean that up, like actually get your design good again, like get back to zero.
00:27:08 ◼ ► And then, you know, that feature creep, that design sort of muddlement will naturally happen over time, but it's a great opportunity.
00:27:15 ◼ ► I can encourage everyone to like take the time to think about your app from a kind of the ground up perspective and not necessarily that you should be like tearing everything apart.
00:27:23 ◼ ► But it's this is a good opportunity to right the wrongs of the past because you get this little bit of sort of system cover because, you know, Apple made us do it.
00:27:40 ◼ ► Like the reason why I'm looking at a tab bar now is that tab bars have massively changed since since they previously were.
00:27:46 ◼ ► Even simple things like, you know, search is now on the bottom everywhere across the whole system.
00:27:57 ◼ ► That will change the layout of things that will change the navigation structure of things like that, that like you might you might change more of the design as part of just doing that.
00:28:12 ◼ ► Well, now tab bars are very different and the system is very different and now they are right for overcast.
00:28:16 ◼ ► So any assumption you've made along the way, you can challenge that assumption now because the conditions have changed significantly.
00:28:31 ◼ ► You need to understand this design and you need to see all over the system quite how broken your app will feel when you try out all the new ones.