WWDC21 and Tumblr… Recap!

By: Praveen Nagaraj

This year’s WWDC focused a lot on bringing improved experiences across iOS and macOS rather than adding a whole lot of new features. 👏

There was a lot of focus on making apps more inclusive and designing for accessibility. ♿️

Here is a summary of all the improvements I think Tumblr can make to its iOS app to improve the user experience! 🎈

1. Better support for larger screen sizes 🖥

This year, Apple improved upon the multitasking experience for the iPad.

Tumblr’s support for large screen sizes is rather poor 😔. The current approach is to include large white spaces on either side of the feed to compensate for the large screen size. The implementation is also rather inconsistent, as many places still have full width views.

Places like the post editor ✍️ on the iPad are full width, and do not represent how the post will look like when published. Paragraphs look more like a single sentence. This is one example of where better optimization for the larger screen will benefit the user experience.

It would be better if Tumblr could implement some sort of sidebar or complementary content to the side of the feed, to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen size. Being a media-centric 🌄 platform, this would greatly improve the user experience.

2. Support for Quick Note ✏️

This year, Quick Notes were introduced to allow a user to quickly bring up a sticky note like user interface to make a note. 📝

Many use Tumblr for scrolling through fashion 👗 and decor inspiration. I personally know friends that use apps like Pinterest and Tumblr to search for inspiration, while jotting notes on the side.

Support for Quick Notes will allow Tumblr to show thumbnails of previously jotted Quick Notes for a specific post, when revisited. This will help users that use the app for this purpose quickly re-gather their thoughts 💭 .

3. Support for widgets 👀

This year’s updated support for more intelligent 🧠 widgets showed the importance of providing at least a few widget options to users.

Tumblr is filled with beautiful images in its posts. The iOS 14 widget craze showed how users love customizing their springboard.

By making widgets that show suggestions, trending posts, etc., it would be a great way to encourage more engagement on the app. It is also a better way to get the user’s attention.

4. Support for keyboard navigation ⌨️

One of the key focuses this year was on improving accessibility to our apps. ♿️

Supporting keyboard based navigation in our apps allow users that cannot easily access the touch screen to use the app.

There are special bluetooth input devices that these users can use to navigate through the app, if we support keyboard based navigation.

Conclusion

It was a great WWDC 🚀 , and it was definitely really fun taking a deep look at Tumblr’s iOS app and thinking about how to improve it! 😁

✅ Looking back at WWDC 2021

by Ethan Saadia

Today was the last day of WWDC 2021. While the main event has concluded, WWDC Community Week continues throughout the weekend! The last few days of labs, sessions, meetups, and code have been exhilarating. There are still numerous ideas to explore, so I will keep releasing new tutorials and apps, and you can keep following along with me.

This year I attended 15 Labs with Apple engineers, which were all incredible experiences to ask questions about the new frameworks and resolve bugs I'm running into in code. Today alone I attended 6 Labs, and here are the highlights!

RealityKit 🤳

I attended all three RealityKit Labs this week, and each time I gained fresh insights about the latest updates. From custom meshes to dynamic particle systems to transparent textures to the subtleties of shaders, I used what I learned in the labs to create educational posts and lead meetups where I introduced other developers to RealityKit.

With Object Capture and my new companion app, you can create realistic 3D models just by uploading photos taken on your iPhone. At this lab I inquired about scanning entire rooms with Object Capture and received tips on how to create the highest quality scans.

Tumblr doesn't yet have any AR features, but the combination of Object Capture and RealityKit 2 makes it a perfect time to start creating the future of immersive blogging.

ARKit ✨

ARKit is the magic behind the scenes that powers RealityKit apps. I worked with engineers to try out my imaginative use cases for the LiDAR and the 3D scan of the real world new LiDAR devices can create.

Machine Learning 🤖

I've been working with machine learning (ML) models on-device ever since I transformed a ride-on toy Mini Cooper into a self driving car. Instead of running on expensive GPUs in the cloud that require an internet connection and uploading sensitive data, on-device ML works extremely quickly without ever leaving the device.

Apple introduced ML Compute last year that supports training ML models on-device in addition to inference. At this lab, the ML team helped me fill in the missing pieces of an example app from Apple's presentation at the NeurIPS 2020 conference.

SharePlay (Group Activities) 🙋🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

SharePlay is a new technology that enables live collaborative experiences through FaceTime. I became interested in pushing the limits of this framework and see how far it can go. The Group Activities team did a great job in their sessions this year, and I'm excited to get started with it next week.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, I believe that SharePlay is the most exciting feature for Tumblr to implement this year to help bring communities together.

PHASE Audio Engine 🔊

I discovered PHASE by chance while scrolling through the list of labs, and I am so glad that I made an appointment. PHASE is a completely custom toolkit for creating immersive 3D sound experiences. I chatted with several members of the PHASE team about its capabilities, and I gathered from our conversation that this year is just the beginning of a fascinating technology to keep an eye on.

Design 🎨

Cutting-edge technology cannot change the world without great design, and it's no secret that Apple produces some of the best design work in the industry. That's what makes appointments with the design team so valuable, because they give you feedback on your own apps.

I felt honored that the designers loved my schedule app Mav App and were very interested in my design and development process. I also received feedback on my new app Object Capture UI and my augmented reality experiences.

USD and USDZ 👾

I was wowed by the demo of a USD scene from Pixar's Toy Story 4 rendering in real time in the Preview app. Attending this lab provided me with extremely useful insight on making my USDZ workflows smarter.

watchOS ⌚️

The watchOS team helped me improve the performance of my Apple Watch app's syncing process using Watch Connectivity, a framework to keep iPhone and Apple Watch on the same page.

I'd love to see Tumblr on Apple Watch, especially now that developers can take advantage of the always-on display on Apple Watch Series 5 and 6. Instead of showing a generic clock view, developers can keep relevant information available at a glance while the user's wrist is resting.

HomeKit 🏠

The announcement of Siri support on third party devices at the Keynote piqued my interest at once. As a hardware developer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast, I imagined opening up Siri to embedded devices, similar to the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa SDKs that have existed for a few years.

Unfortunately, third party Siri devices will be initially restricted to select Apple MFI partners at launch, but I remain hopeful that Apple will open up support to more developers in the future.

SwiftUI 📱

Last but not least, SwiftUI received countless updates to make it even easier to build entire apps in the UI framework that is redefining iOS development.

I was lucky to receive an appointment with the engineers who work on SwiftUI Data Flow, and they helped me navigate a complex use case for communicating and syncing state between SwiftUI and UIKit code.

Looking ahead

After a very busy week, I'm looking forward to taking some time to rest and then continuing to explore the new technologies announced at WWDC. Thank you for following along with me, and it's never too early to count down to WWDC 2022! ⏰

Feel free to check out my work and reach out at any time.

WWDC Recap 🥳

WWDC 2021 was a blast for me. I had a ton of fun watching all of the sessions and interacting with a ton of new people. I also had a lot of fun participating in the labs I requested. I would like to go over some of my favorite new things that Apple introduced this week; along with some of their great sessions!

Siri Shortcuts 🖥

Siri Shortcuts are a very open space for app developers. They can build new functionality directly into a system app with millions of users. This year Apple brought shortcuts to the Mac! This is a big step for shortcuts, as it brings a whole new level of automation that was previously not possible for the average person. It is now more important than ever to make sure your app has well-rounded shortcuts support. Without well-rounded shortcuts support, an app developer could be missing out on tons of potential user’s who choose their platform over others because they support shortcuts.

iPad Multitasking 🪟

In iPadOS 15 Apple introduced a set of new features that will make iPad multitasking more discoverable for the average user. In previous versions, these features have been hiding behind gestures that are not very apparent. Now that these features are much more prominent, it is important to support them well. Making sure that your app supports multiple windows and split-screen is necessary to provide a good user experience. It is also extremely important to design an iPad app as its app, not just a scaled-up version of the iOS app.

Share Play 🎮

Share plays are a big feature for Facetime. These new features allow users to share brand new experiences while not being in the same location. It will be important for Social Media, and content-sharing platforms to support customers' experiences for Share Play. This is because users will be looking for interesting ways to share what they are doing. When your app does not support it, they will have a worse experience with your app than others. This may lead to a drop in the user base when there is no support for Share Play.

Accessibility 🦼

Making more accessible apps is important for an app. It is important to allow anyone to enjoy your platform no matter what their condition is. This week, Apple spent a lot of time talking about making apps more accessible for people. I think that this is super great and a good move for an Apple. I believe that accessibility is important and should be supported as much as possible. That is why apps need to start making an effort to make their apps more accessible for people to use.

In Conclusion 😢

For Tumblr

For Tumblr this WWDC has brought a lot of opportunity to build a better platform for users. Adding more support for Shortcuts, a new iPad UI and improving Accessibility would propel the Tumblr app past other platforms. I believe that with a few small improvements Tumblr could become a very appealing platform for a new generation of users.

For Me

It is sad to see the end of WWDC so quickly. It is such a fun experience new things, and new. I hope that the conference will be able to go back to what it was before. I am happy that I now have the opportunity to learn so much more about designing and building apps. I can’t wait to see more stuff that comes out as newer devices and hardware are released.

Tumblr of new faces in the App Store

We arrived at our fifth and final day of the event, with a sinking heart for not being able to see all the amazing sessions that Apple has brought to us. But I couldn't keep myself from giving my two cents on the new way to optimize the product page in the App Store that emerged at WWDC21. ❤️

We have at our side the following elements that can be used to make a great first impression: app's icon, name and subtitle, screenshots, promotional text, and description to make a great first impression.

And when we come to the App Store Connect side, there are many new ways to make our product page more relevant, by using custom product pages to highlight different features and content for different users. All this to make the product page even more relevant and effective for your audience. 🗣

Tumblr using features in your favour

Despite being a well known and consolidated social networking application, it would be marvellous to test these new features and enable the following communication elements:

In addition to the benefit of the engagement applied directly to the users, it is possible to take into account the metrics from the given data, and handle this analytic data from within the App Store Connect itself.

Tumblr is truly a unique and authentic app. It sure has a lot to offer us! ✨

by: @victoriafaria

Behind the Scenes of Pixar's Toy Story 4 with USD 🤠 🧑‍🚀 🦖 🐖

by Ethan Saadia

Hidden in the WWDC 2021 session "Create 3D workflows with USD," Apple showed off the ability to view 3D scenes in real time with Preview.

The video shows the 3D scene of the Antiques Mall from Toy Story 4 with each object selectable and exportable as its own USD file. This is all running live in the Preview app, which comes free and built-in on all Macs.

USD is an open-source 3D file format developed by Pixar for creating their animated movies, and Apple adopted the mobile format USDZ for augmented reality.

It's so cool to get a peek at how Pixar makes their movies, and they are releasing even more internal tools as open-source later this year.

Using live previews of USDZ files in AR Quick Look on iOS or Preview on Mac, apps like Tumblr can make it as easy to view 3D content as an image. And with Object Capture and my companion app, creating high quality 3D models has never been easier.

Check out the link to see how you can try it out! 👆

Widgets for iPad

In iPadOS 15, Apple introduced a ton of new features that people have been enjoying on iOS for a year now. Specifically Apple has brought widgets and the app library to the iPad. The App Library does not have much of an affect on Tumblr, however widgets can.

Designing Beautiful Widgets

Apple has had a few sessions this WWDC talking about widgets. They had one on principles of great widgets and adding intelligence to your widgets. These sessions are really good to watch if you are wondering about the best ways to make widgets.

How Tumblr can adapt to widgets on iPad OS 15

Widgets allow a user to quickly glance at the content within their favorite apps, right on their home screen. Tumblr does not currently support any widgets. I think that Tumblr should add support for widgets so users can keep up to date on their favorite blogs or see the trending content.

Some possible options for widgets would be

1. A list of the newest posts on your feed

2. An overview of a creators blog

3. An image view of the top image posts

4. A text view of the top text posts

Simplifying app navigation using the keyboard on iPad

By: Praveen Nagaraj

Apple published a session on Tuesday that discussed using the keyboard ⌨️ to simplify navigation through an app's views and view controllers on iPad.

Though it may seem unnecessary, web applications like Twitter have proven the usability of a pure keyboard-based navigation. This is not just for ease-of-use, but also accessibility ♿️.

Another one of Apple's key focuses for this WWDC was building increasingly inclusive and accessible applications. This is seen as a key focus ❗️ throughout their sessions, new changes in iOS 15, and from the start a core part of iOS.

Keyboard ⌨️ based navigation in Tumblr's iOS app will make it more accessible for a greater set of users. Tumblr is a great platform to share creative content, and some of the best creative minds cannot always operate a touch screen 😕.

Building accessible apps ♿️ that support keyboard-based navigation will allow people with certain disabilities to use input devices to control and navigate through views and view controllers.

Simple shortcuts for close, next, back, and highlighting and selecting posts will improve access to Tumblr's app. Very few social platforms adopt accessible input on iOS, and it would be great to see Tumblr lead the way ☺️!

🤯 Turn photos into 3D in just one click with Object Capture UI

An app created by Ethan Saadia TLDR: Download the app here

This week I shared an example of 3D scanning a koala with Object Capture using RealityKit on iOS 15. After capturing images on iPhone, iPad, or a separate camera, compatible Mac devices can stitch them together into a 3D model. Apple released two sample apps for Object Capture, one for iOS to take photos and a command line tool for macOS to create the model. Using the macOS sample requires significant familiarity with developer tools like Xcode and Terminal, so I decided to make Object Capture accessible to everyone. With Object Capture UI, you are just one click away from a high quality 3D model. After downloading the app, select a folder of photos to use as an input, and optionally change the model quality. Higher quality means more detail and smoother geometry, but it takes longer to process and produces a larger file size. When you're ready, click Begin Reconstruction, and you're done! The app will then get to work processing the photos, and at the end it will allow you to save it. From there, drop it into AR Quick Look on a mobile device, use it in an Xcode project, or even 3D print it. If you would like to try out Object Capture UI, download it from my GitHub repo here.

The secrets hidden under the screen curtains

We must always know that an application, on any platform, requires many lines of code tailored by the developers, a well-built interface made by the designers, among other things, that may include many other professionals (even from other areas!), they had to carefully think, prototype and validate to ensure that I am here able to write and publish this post! 📝✍️

With that many elements at the table, of course, we might not be able to think of every scenario that our application will misbehave, these are the famous hangs and delays that can be critical (we hope not!) and make a weird impression on whoever is using them.

That the session of WWDC21 from this Thursday that I chose to comment on and bring some insights trying to be as less technical as possible so that this post is readable for anyone.

What comes after the tap? 👆

When the user tries to make some kind of interaction on the application (the most common being a tap) there is a whole process behind performing some action and displaying it back to the user, it should be interpreted and properly translated to the application to handle.

When the finger interacts with the screen 👉📲, for the common user it may seem like nothing really happened, but by looking under the curtains, it becomes evident that each iteration has a beginning, an execution sequence, and an end to it, this behaviour is what we call "thread", meaning an execution of a specific sequence of tasks in the given context.

In this interval, there are several threads that are consulted on the code and work together to execute everything they need to guarantee the answer. This process, which isn't visible to the end-user, shouldn't be too time-consuming, and should never delay the response feedback. 🗣

Delays can occur when this queue is full and the extra seconds make the user repeat the interaction, which consequently repeats the query process, thus generating the hang, and the answer is shown after a brief moment, at that point in the championship, the "good experience" was already lost.

That could be worse 💢! Threads cannot always happen together, sometimes communication must be asynchronous, that is, run one thread at a time, because they have dependencies. When this error occurs it's not just a delay, it's a block! 🚫

When requesting a network or when using hardware resources that access files, for example, they should be coded with scenarios in mind that should guarantee good performance and prevent directly impacting user interactions.

How to minimize hangs from our apps?

The main tip is: reduce work on the main thread. It's always recommended that we optimize the work of the main thread and delegate functions to other ones to improve execution time.

Some implementation suggestions and best practices from the WWDC session that make these threads responsive and ensure good performance.

Even though they are good options, it's necessary to be aware of the tradeoffs 🚨 that each one can offer.

Communicating with the end-user ⭐️

Although these are things that happen within the application system, it's always necessary to communicate in some way with the user! This is part of a good design that can predict these kinds of events.

by: @victoriafaria

Occupying springboard real estate by creating beautiful widgets, and supporting Quick Notes

By: Praveen Nagaraj

In my first post, I talked about how Tumblr isn't taking advantage of larger devices, being a very media-centric application.

Widgets

The iOS 14 widget craze showed how much people were excited by the idea of having a new look for their spring board (home screens). Widgets from apps like Photos makes the spring board more personal for users.

Yesterday, WWDC offered a session on more intelligent widgets, which got me searching... only to find that Tumblr didn't offer any widgets. Tumblr has lots of potential for taking advantage of widgets on iOS, as a media-centric app.

There are a few ideas I have:

1. Widgets for showing trending posts (full view images)

2. Widgets for showing trending hashtags

3. Widgets for showing stats such as likes/reblogs on my latest posts

Tumblr could also allow configuring the widget to a specific blog. For example if I have stats widget, I can choose whether it shows the stats for the latest posts on my personal Tumblr or the Codrs Tumblr.

Having widgets that show updating information will be a more effective way of getting less hardcore Tumblr users to open the app more often!

Quick Notes

iOS 15 introduced a new type of note taking ability called Quick Note on the iPad. The user can drag in from the bottom right corner with their Apple Pencil to bring up a sticky note like interface.

Quick Note works based on NSUserActivity to bring up a thumbnail of a Quick Note whenever a user visits a page where the Quick Note was created. This could be a site or a section in the app.

Many people use Tumblr for fashion inspiration and searching for new looks. Since building support for Quick Note suggestions and linking is just based on NSUserActivity, it should be fairly easy to build support for this new feature for Tumblr.

It would probably make it much more intuitive, if a user visits a specific post or Tumblr blog, and their Quick Note thumbnail intelligently shows up!

Labs, Sessions, and Meetups (Oh my!)

by Ethan Saadia

Today was a busy Day 3 at WWDC 2021! I began the morning by watching a session detailing advanced graphics and rendering with RealityKit 2, including custom shaders, full control over meshes, and the ability to customise post-processing events. To prepare for my RealityKit Lab at the end of the day, I began trying out as many on the new features as I could in my previous projects and sample apps. As I prepared for my Object Capture Lab to learn more about best practices for scanning, I decided to test out the quality of the scanned meshes by 3D printing the koala I scanned yesterday. Although I reduced the size to speed up printing time, I was impressed at the level of detail I captured with just 64 photos.

At the Object Capture Lab I learned some great and useful tips for improving scans that I will share in a later post. As I worked through trying out more RealityKit features, I joined the Demystify SwiftUI session watch-party at the WWDC Lounges, where Apple Engineers answered questions live as we watched the video. Throughout the day I accumulated an entire list of RealityKit questions across multiple Xcode projects, and the engineers who talked with me were extremely helpful and made the most of our short appointment by going through all of my questions. I have four ‼️ Lab appointments tomorrow, and I can't wait to experiment some more with the new frameworks and learn more from the Apple engineers who built them.

AR Roundtable Meetup

In the virtual Augmented Reality Lab that I built for WWDC Community Week, I gathered a group of developers to discuss augmented reality. I met several people with exciting AR projects, gave an interactive presentation about RealityKit, answered all their questions, and led a conversation about AR on Apple platforms and beyond.

It was especially wonderful to interact with people who have benefitted from my online tutorials and hear about the apps they have built. My favorite part of being a developer is giving back to the community that helped me get started, so hosting this meetup and meeting my readers was an extremely rewarding experience!

Dub Dub Day 3 🙌

My day today was mostly taken up by labs. I had one big one talking about the future of my App Jellycuts. The reason for this is because of how iOS 15 and macOS 12 have changed Shortcuts. To better fit this new method of Shortcuts sharing, I will have to do a lot of work, from rewriting a good chunk of my sharing code 🤯 to possibly making a whole macOS server 😅. All of this change got me thinking about how platforms like Tumblr need to adapt to new spaces. That is what I will be talking about today.

Discover and be able to enter the faces

You've probably already skipped those introductory screens that explain how the application works, a.k.a onboardings, or you've given up putting your information on a very long form. I know! I was also on that boat once! 👀👀

Although there are several super cool new technologies and features, it's also necessary that we know how to apply them in a correct way, ensuring a more fluid and pleasing experience within the application. The same applies to releasing a new feature, for example, how can people learn what your app is able to do?

On the third day of the WWDC21 event, the "Discoverable design" session was able to deliver to us several insights on how to create a more interactive app and memorable experiences starting with the onboarding and coming all the way to the app itself. I will comment on two of the ones that I liked the most ❤️

Sketchnoting Dive into RealityKit 2

by Ethan Saadia

The first session I watched today at WWDC 2021 was Dive into RealityKit 2, an overview of the updates to Apple’s newest augmented reality framework. At WWDC Community Week, GoodNotes highlighted sketchnoting in a tutorial session, so I thought I’d give this format a try and provide a quick visualization of the new updates. I’ve been writing RealityKit tutorials since its initial release at WWDC 2019 with my series RealityKit Snippets, and its been my 3D graphics framework of choice since then for AR apps.

Custom Shaders & Meshes

RealityKit 2 brings the framework to the next level with custom shaders and meshes, features that let developers customize materials and graphics and generate 3D shapes/content on the fly. This includes the steaming pizzas and confetti that Apple highlighted at the Keynote on Monday. While RealityKit remains a high-level and approachable framework to use, the new customization options provide control over content that used to require SceneKit or Metal.

Faces

With the new mesh features, you can access face meshes from the TrueDepth camera and modify the materials and texture. For example, the session showed off a face painting app with glitter. This feature will be great for AR photo filters that need to place content that fits to the face's shape.

Audio

Spatial Audio also received as mention, with a new AudioBufferResource that lets you create spatial-aware sounds dynamically instead of loading from a static file.

Materials

I've been waiting for transparent materials in AR for over three years, and I'm so excited that it's finally here! Image and video textures can now include alpha channels, so 2D content can have irregular borders. Going along with the theme of customization, RealityKit 2 provides full control over physically based materials from the USD format.

Entity-Component System

The session also highlighted updates to the Entity-Component System, the architecture that RealityKit apps follow to organize apps. The session introduced Systems, a way to control 3D models, listen for updates, and coordinate events. EntityQuery is a new way to search a scene for entities with specified components, a great task for a System to manage.

The session encouraged developers to include all state and properties for objects in Components instead of subclassing Entity. Entity should be used a container of components with an identifier, so all information about the appearance, animation, behaviors, and other state should belong in components.

Animation

It is now possible to blend multiple animations together, adjust the speed, and work with animation timelines. Again, it will be easier to tailor animations beyond what a USDZ already contains.

Character Controller

Leveraging a 3D reconstruction of the world from the LiDAR on iPad Pro and iPhone 12 Pro, Scene Understanding makes AR experiences even more realistic by allowing virtual content to collide with and be occluded by the real world. In my NSSpain 2020 presentation, I built an AR racing game with Scene Understanding.

New this year, a Character Controller makes it easier to work with user-controlled objects. Simply define a CapsuleShape that takes the shape and size of the 3D model to detect collisions with the world around you. Then you can call the move(to:) method to have the character navigate around real obstacles on its way to the final destination. Or, if you'd prefer a more direct path, teleport(to:) will move the object without paying attention to objects in the way.

That is all the major announcements included in the Dive into RealityKit 2 session! I will be writing more about the new sessions later this week, which will go into more detail about these new features.

Adopting Apple's transition towards larger/modern cells in table views in iOS 15

Since iOS 14, apps such as Apple's Health app and COVID-19 app have started adopting larger cells for table views.

These cells do not span edge to edge, do not have the traditional divider, and have a larger height and font size. These new table view cells represent Apple's continuous transition towards a more user-friendly and accessible design language.

Below are images that show how the new Settings table view in iOS 15 (right) has changed to adopt this new design language, compared to iOS 14 (left). The old table view cells definitely feel more archaic and boring.

Adopting this new look in Tumblr's settings or any other table views that represent options inside the Tumblr app will make it more in line with the design language expected from iOS devices now.

It is an unsaid truth that the more an app feels native to the user, the more that user will feel comfortable with the app. Users will not have to search or think if the app feels more native along with the system design language.

Certainly, it would make navigating Tumblr's setting page faster and easier and also more comfortable.

Tumblr for a new user on iOS

I have been using Tumblr for the past week, before that, I have never really jumped into it.

My first impression of the platform was that it was a more user choice-focused platform, kinda like Reddit. I got this impression from the Markdown and HTML editors that you can use to customize your blog and write posts. I was really impressed that a modern social media company still allowed the choice to edit custom HTML for blogs and a rich content editor for posts. However, this was all in the web interface...

When I opened the iPad app, I quickly realized that the app is nowhere near optimized for the iPad or any of Apple's newer technologies. In this post, I will be going over how I think Tumblr can take some of the new technologies Apple has released so far in WWDC and make their platform one of the most advanced social media on iOS.

What I think Tumblr could improve upon

The iPad UI

Other posts have touched a lot more on Tumblr's iPad UI so I will not go as in-depth as them. However I do have to say, it really needs improvement. Having one central post-column looks comical on an iPad and really ruins the look and feel of Tumblr. I think adapting to Apple's new multi-column layouts for iPad would be an amazing choice for Tumblr.

Supporting new technologies like multi-column layouts would put Tumblr ahead of the competition. A lot of social media currently do not support iPad's as well as they could. They just show a scaled-up version of their mobile interface. This leads to a lot of annoyances about the iPad app. With a lot of people moving to iPad's as the main device, having an unoptimized iPad app will send people away from using Tumblr as their blogging platform.

Multitasking

Apple so far has talked a lot about the new iPad multitasking features. Now there isn't really much at all that has been added, it is just way more discoverable than before. With more discoverability comes more users looking to use it in their favorite apps.

When I tried to use Tumblr in a multitasking manner, it just fails to work. There is no way to have multiple windows of the app, and when it is in split-screen the UI fails to adapt well. I believe adding support for iPad's new multitasking features will allow Tumblr to fly ahead of other social media at a user experience level. On Apple devices, Everything Just Works. And for the Tumblr app and multitasking, it doesn't. New and returning users will look to use multitasking and then learn that it is not supported, leaving them a little disappointed. I think supporting features like these are essential for Tumblr to thrive in the growing social media space.

Shortcuts Support

A lot of my time is spent using and creating Shortcuts. I really wish that Tumblr had a lot more support for Shortcuts. Currently, Tumblr has one action, and you need to login into that action inside the Shortcuts app. Even if you are logged into the Tumblr app on your device. I think that improved support for Shortcuts will be necessary for the future for any app on an Apple Platform. Doing simple things: like opening a specific blog, or going to your favorite creator's page, should all be doable through Shortcuts actions. Apple has been putting a lot of time and development into Shortcuts, and I really believe that Tumblr should integrate as well as it can into the Shortcut ecosystem.

In Total

I believe that Tumblr should look into supporting more of iOS's power-user features. These features will bring more people to the platform. It also makes Tumblr a good model candidate for an iOS social media app.

A better inclusive and accessible design

Apple has always focused on providing a great experience, from the presentations to what it proposes for the developers. On the second day of the WWDC21 event, a theme that keeps coming back is the importance of a more inclusive and accessible design on all of the different application scopes.

It can even be seen in the language that we use and look for reference, respecting different perspectives, adopting more accessibility features, making our design more inclusive, especially in the area of ​​content that includes writing, images, audio, video, it can be seen everywhere... everything we use to "talk" to our audience. 🗣🗣🗣

Below you can see the two sessions that talk more about it.

Bringing more accessibility features ✅

Dynamic type is not new. It's something that has been around since iOS 7, but its adoption by apps has been somewhat slow. Since iOS 11, Apple has been making significant improvements to the feature that should lead to wide-scale adoption.

Getting a little more technical... ⚙️🛠 Dynamic type supports up to seven size settings, but that's not the limit, for example, the body text style is 17pt in the default setting, but can range from 14pt to 23pt, and we can, in extreme cases count with the accessibility setting that supports even larger fonts up to 53pt for body text.

My mother ❤️is a great example of someone that is heavily dependent on this particular feature. Communication and social networking apps that have a lot of content in a very small screen real estate (iPhone screen) can take advantage of this and avoid losing any content due to the lack of space.

Does Tumblr handle Dynamic Type?

Tumblr allows us to share many different types of media in a single post. That makes the content super cool and unique, however, posts that have a lot of "regular" sized text, despite having good contrast (✨bonus points for Tumblr here!✨) still, readability can be compromised when compared to a wider range of users.

To make our vision even more inclusive when developing our apps, it's necessary to start by making the design process more inclusive as well. I'm sure this will affect the design and implementation of a good application. 📱

By: @victoriafaria