How to Make Your Own App Promo Cards

As many of you know, my Halftone app was featured by Starbucks as its Pick of the Week this past August. I visit Starbucks daily for my morning caffeine fix, and over the course of a couple weeks, I managed to collect a small stack of the Halftone cards. They’ve proven to be a fantastic promotional tool and a very handy way to give someone a free copy of the app.

They’re so useful that I decided to make my own app promo cards for an upcoming event (larger image).

It took me a little time to simplify the workflow, but if you follow my instructions closely (and optionally use the included templates), you should be able to create your own cards in an hour or two. Best of all, the general process will work for anything that needs to feature custom codes or text…it doesn’t have to be an app, and they don’t have to be cards.

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Illustrator to HTML5 Canvas Plug-In Updated for CS6

My Ai->Canvas Plug-In (short introductory video) was released almost two years ago, yet I still hear from developers and designers who use it regularly. When Creative Suite 6 was released this past May, users began to report that the plug-in wouldn’t work with the new version. A quick search revealed this paragraph on page 4 of the Adobe Illustrator CS6 Porting Guide:

Creative Suite 6 requires a different development environment from previous releases; this means that you must recompile plug-ins built with an earlier version of the Illustrator SDK in order for them to run in Illustrator CS6.

Reading this, I knew I’d have to schedule some time to port the code from the CS3 SDK to the CS6 SDK. And, because CS6 is the first version of Illustrator that’s available in both 32- and 64-bit PC versions, I also knew that I’d have to update some of the data types. Oh…I’d have to make sure that all of the changes also worked on the Mac too (fortunately, my Juicy Bits experience has made this part much easier).

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I’ve been heads-down working on my next Juicy Bits app, and it was just approved by Apple tonight. If all goes according to plan, it’ll be released in the next week or two. Watch for it. While I’m not ready to reveal the app name, I do want to share the icon. This beautiful icon was designed by SoftFacade, the same folks who created my Halftone icon. We’ve collaborated over the past month or so to arrive at this final design, and I love it. Initial concepts were actual sketches, and as we iterated, the sketches became photos. In the final phases, the photos became very complex Photoshop shape layers loaded with effects. Each “photograph” in the icon is made up of tens (if not hundreds) of vector-based shapes that have been professionally composed to produce this final result. The PSD file weighs in at a whopping 173MB! An icon is the front door to your app, and it’s absolutely worth the time and expense to have one created by a professional design team; SoftFacade is one of those teams.
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I’ve been heads-down working on my next Juicy Bits app, and it was just approved by Apple tonight. If all goes according to plan, it’ll be released in the next week or two. Watch for it.

While I’m not ready to reveal the app name, I do want to share the icon. This beautiful icon was designed by SoftFacade, the same folks who created my Halftone icon. We’ve collaborated over the past month or so to arrive at this final design, and I love it.

Initial concepts were actual sketches, and as we iterated, the sketches became photos. In the final phases, the photos became very complex Photoshop shape layers loaded with effects. Each “photograph” in the icon is made up of tens (if not hundreds) of vector-based shapes that have been professionally composed to produce this final result. The PSD file weighs in at a whopping 173MB!

An icon is the front door to your app, and it’s absolutely worth the time and expense to have one created by a professional design team; SoftFacade is one of those teams.

This week, I’ve been working on a radial menu control for an upcoming Juicy Bits app. I recorded a short video that illustrates the evolution of the project and shows the menu in action. The radial menu has proven to be a quick and convenient way to select context-sensitive options. Also, because the buttons are equidistant from the center, your finger doesn’t have to travel around the screen as much.

Smaller Apps with Vector Images

3/26/2012: Added an update at the end of the post.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on new vector processing code for a future update of my Halftone app for iOS. As I’ve mentioned before, Halftone draws a lot of its graphics using vectors, and as a result, it automatically takes advantage of the new iPad Retina display. These recent experiments have forced me to take a closer look at vector handling in iOS, and I thought I’d share what I’ve learned.

By the end of this post, I hope to convince you that a vector version of your app may require only 14.8% of the space that a bitmap-based Retina version requires.

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Halftone and the iPad Retina Display

Today is delivery day for the new iPad! So, I thought I’d show some differences between the non-Retina display on the original iPad and iPad 2, and the new Retina display on the iPad (3rd generation) using Halftone.

First, it seems common to miscalculate the math behind the new screen. While each dimension has been doubled, because it’s been doubled in both dimensions, there are actually four times (2 x 2 = 4) as many pixels on the screen. This diagram illustrates the difference:

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Confusing iOS Location Services Prompt

Two days ago, I released an update to my Halftone app for iOS that adds an oft-requested feature: the ability to open photos directly from Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram. The new image picker is the result of more than a month of design and development work, the same code base runs across all devices (with a tailored UI for each device), and it serves as a drop-in replacement for the native iOS image picker. I’m proud of the final product, so I was dismayed to read one of the first tweets about the new version:

One of my favorite apps (Halftone) just updated & added location services as a “key” to continue using the app … WTF?? DELETED!!

Shortly thereafter from another customer:

@juicybits requiring using location services to use app?? 1 star rating

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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I Have No Idea

In early December, 2011, I was both surprised and flattered to discover that Apple had named Halftone as one of the best photo apps in its App Store Rewind 2011. Since then, I’ve received a lot of e-mail asking me how I did it. That is, what did I do to “get” Apple to pick Halftone? I don’t know what kind of response they expect, but I’m sure that I disappoint them when I respond:

I have no idea.

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Ever since I’ve moved to my new blog, the most common request I get (by far) is: “when are you going to post your wallpaper images again?” Well, the answer is: today! I’ve gone through the 160+ images that I’ve released over the years and culled them down to a set that represents some of the most popular along with some of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them.
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Ever since I’ve moved to my new blog, the most common request I get (by far) is: “when are you going to post your wallpaper images again?” Well, the answer is: today!

I’ve gone through the 160+ images that I’ve released over the years and culled them down to a set that represents some of the most popular along with some of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them.