User Interface

About Michael

Michael is a student at Aalborg University, Denmark, studying Engineering Psychology — it’s about how to shape (technology mostly) products to fit humans. Although they don’t do a lot of visual design, he’s taken a personal interest in that on his own, hoping to land a job as a designer / user experience researcher at a medium sized company after he graduates this summer.

Info

About Amusic

Michael made the app with some of his fellow students, designing most of it on his own. Sadly, the app was actually never submitted to the App Store due to lack of time to finish it.

What he particularly likes about it…

“The two screens are actually the same — the player view. But unlike in the Apple Music app where the queue is an afterthought that is hidden beneath the cover art, in this design, you can choose whether to be utilitarian and use the queue view or have it look pretty. Easily change between the two. The player is beautiful either way. When you change, the song animates to its new position and stays there until you decide to change it again. Choose your style and forget about it if you like.

Better yet, the waveform slider is both pretty and SUPER useful as it lets you easily fast forward to your favourite part of the song.”

…and dislikes

For You

“I’m not very happy with the artwork on the “for you” screen. Also it should pack more content pr. screen estate.”

Thank you, Michael, for sharing 🙂

About the “Show and Tell” Blog Series

Show and Tell presents developers’ and designers’ most and least favorite elements of UI/UX in an app they helped create or design. If you’d like to share, submissions are open! Submit your app here! Thank you 🙂

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In this new series on this blog, I’d like to give developers and designers a place to show off  one UI / UX element they’re particularly proud of, and one they particularly dislike, in an app they worked on.

Submit now 🙂

If you’re a developer or designer and would love to share a UI/UX element in your app you particularly like, and one you particularly dislike, please mail me!

What I need from you

  • Your name, or, if you like, state that your submission should be anonymous. Your email and other contact info will not be published
  • Your website, twitter/facebook/instagram/github handle, or any other way you’d like to be credited (if it’s not an anonymous submission)
  • A short description of who you are and what you do
  • Your involvement with the app
  • The name of the app with a link (if you’re willing to share, but it’s not a must)
  • A screenshot, short video or gif of a UI/UX element in your app you particularly like, with 1-2 sentences of why you like it
  • A screenshot, short video or gif of a UI/UX element in your app you particularly dislike, with 1-2 sentences of why you don’t like it
  • Please only send apps you worked on yourself
  • Multiple submissions are fine

A post will look something like this:
Submissions will be published on no particular schedule in no particular order on this blog.
You’ll be notified beforehand with a preview.
Submissions will (or will not) be published at my own discretion.

I’m looking forward to your submissions!

For updates, please follow this blog, or @showandtell_ui on twitter.

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When testing your Today Widget on macOS Mojave and you see something like this using Dark Mode:

Widget with wrong appearance in macOS Mojave's Dark Mode

don’t fret, there’s a rather easy fix.

In your Today Widget’s Info.plist, in NSExtension > NSExtensionAttributes, there’s NSExtensionPointVersion.
For the widget above – with the wrong appearance – the version was set to 2.0:

NSExtensionPointVersion in Info.plist

To see where the problem might be, I created a new widget under macOS Mojave, and it turns out, it uses version 3.0, which also fixes the appearance issue:

New NSExtensionPointVersion in Info.plist

and voilà, it worked like a charm:

Widget with correct appearance in Dark Mode on macOS Mojave

Compatibility

I’ve tested back to macOS El Capitan 10.11 and it worked, it will possibly work for earlier versions of macOS, too.

 

Hope it helps 🙂

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