Mu.DA - 3 mushroom wallpapers. Buy here
∞ McHive – the World’s Smallest McDonald’s
Some of McDonald’s restaurants in Sweden have beehives on their rooftops. The initiative started out locally but is now growing. More franchisees around the country are joining the cause and have also started replacing the grass around their restaurants with flowers and plants that are important for the wellbeing of wild bees. To celebrate the initiative which is part of McDonald’s Swedens sustainability work, we created what could be the world’s smallest McDonald’s – a fully functioning beehive.
I love reading stories like this.
∞ Preview: Inside Apple's Redesigned NYC Flagship Store
Lance Ulanoff, writing for Lifewire:
The 13-year-old store, which sits at the base of Central Park and is instantly recognizable thanks to its iconic 32-foot glass cube with a suspended Apple logo inside of it, has undergone a massive, 2-year-long reinvention project that somehow maintains the core essence of what drew hundreds of people to the store to line up for their first iPhones more than a decade ago.
This is the store where I lined up for three hours to get my first iPad, an iPad 2. I got to visit it again next time I'm in NYC.
Created a baseline typography guide for all things dA. It only uses one font, Inter. The guide will evolve over time, but I do hope to use Inter for everything across all platforms for a long time.
Trying to develop branded components in Flutter.
I really don’t like Material on iOS. And you can’t ship iOS-like UI on Android. So custom branded design is the way to go.
It may take extra time initially, but it’s worth it when you need to ship both iOS and Android.
iPhone bilateral charging is supper appealing. Imagine that you no longer have to carry anything for your watch and airpods.
Adopting Inter
After I noticed @rsms's Inter font from this tweet, I immediately tried it out on my website. The result is better than what I had (Lato + Alegreya). Now everything on mangoumbrella.com uses Inter.
I plan to do incremental changes to my website towards a better design. Adopting a great font is a significant step.
One of Flutter's best traits: everything is open source. The built-in widgets' source code is the best resource to learn how to build your own widgets. For example, with just 267 lines of code, the iOS button's implementation demonstrates how you can use simple animations and gestures detectors.
Trying Out Figma
This week I finally sit down and got my hands dirty in design. I partially explored design systems, sketched some logos, colors, and typography in Figma. Then I tried a slight re-design of my website's home page:
A version of the https://mangoumbrella.com design in Figma.
Figma is really intuitive. When I first saw others' cursors moving in real time, it blew my mind. But for me as a one-person shop, its intuitive interface is the reason I love it. I tried Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch. They all failed me. Figma is the first tool I felt home-ish. I still struggle with it, but I do see its potential in my workflow.
I know the design I did today isn't great. It's not even good. It's the worst thing I will probably come up with. And I'm not updating my home page to be exactly what I have designed.
However, the design did improve the website in some areas. And I just incorporated them in the latest build.
Separating code and design does make the product better. I will spend more time on dedicated design sessions.
∞ Flutter 1.9's Support of macOS Catalina and iOS 13
Chris Sells, PM for the Flutter developer experience, announced on Google Developers Blog:
Supporting macOS Catalina and iOS 13
As Apple prepares to release Catalina, the latest version of macOS, we’ve worked hard to make sure that Flutter is ready for you to upgrade. We’ve updated the end-to-end tooling experience to ensure it works well on Catalina and with Xcode 11. This includes adding support for the new Xcode build system, enabling 64-bit support throughout the toolchain, and simplifying platform dependencies.
With iOS 13 on the way, we’ve also been working to ensure your Flutter apps look great on the latest iPhone release. Flutter 1.9 includes an implementation of the iOS 13 draggable toolbar, with both long-press and drag-from-right, and supports vibration feedback. Work on iOS dark mode is also well underway with a number of pull requests already merged.
Finally, in the latest development builds, you can now turn on experimental support for Bitcode, which is Apple’s platform-independent intermediate representation of a compiled program. Submitting your app as Bitcode allows Apple to optimize your binary in the future without resubmission, and opens the door to Flutter potentially supporting platforms like watchOS and tvOS that require Bitcode for app submission.
I have been seriously looking into Flutter lately. And this is the moment I was sold to it. Timely support of latest macOS and iOS versions are critical for my projects.