SJNotificationViewController

Tumblr, I made a thing yesterday that might be of interest to you. It’s called SJNotificationViewController, and it lets you put dead-simple alerts/notifications in your iPhone app. It’s for letting users know that something is happening / has happened (an image is uploading, or there was an error refreshing a timeline, for example) without throwing up a big ol’ UIAlertView that blocks their workflow. Twitterrific uses notifications like this for showing how many new tweets there have been since the last refresh, or when it can’t connect to Twitter.

Above, you can see a video of a notification in action. They slide up from the bottom of whatever view they’re attached to, and then slide back down when you’re done with them. They’re customisable, too — you can set the text, the “level” of notification (red for error, blue for regular messages, and green for success), what happens when the notification is tapped, and whether or not the notification has a spinner to indicate activity. You can learn more about SJNotificationViewController on GitHub.

I don’t know. It’s a thing I made for a thing of my own, and it’s in its infancy, but I thought I’d share it all the same.

Peeking

I’d like to talk about a little iOS UI design pattern that I like a lot. I’m not sure if it’s common enough to have a name yet, so I’m going to call it “peeking” for now.

1. An Example

The video above is of a list view. You can see that when you pull down (scrolling the list up past the first item), there’s a little bit of information. When you let go, the list view rubber-bands back and that information goes away. In this case, the list is of search results, and the bit of information is the term that the user searched for. By pulling down a bit on the list, you can peek at a bit of related information. It doesn’t make conceptual sense to put the search query in the list itself (since the list is of search results, and the search query isn’t a search result), and it won’t necessarily fit in the view’s title bar (besides, the title bar should be for describing what the view is/does).

2. Generally

I think you’d use a peeking view when you have some information that the user might need to be reminded of but would otherwise live another view (requiring the user to leave the current view). By including the information above the top of the list, the information’s out of the way if the user doesn’t need it, but only a pull-down gesture away when they do. Alternatively, you could use a peeking view when you wanted to provide users with a hint about what they should do. Users who already know what to do wouldn’t see anything unusual, but users who don’t know what to do could just pull down to see the hint and let go once they’ve seen it.

3. Other Examples

I don’t know of many other examples of peeking. If you try to reply to a tweet in Tweetbot, you can pull the compose area down and you’ll see the tweet that you’re replying to. I guess, technically, you can also see it in apps (Twitter or otherwise) that use pull-to-refresh — that little “pull to refresh” view also shows the last time that the app refreshed its data. If you know of any other apps that use peeking, or if there are other posts about it by other people, I’d love to hear about them. Answers enabled?

Christmas French Toast Brunch!

(I used egg nog instead of milk. That’s what makes it Christmas-y. Also that it’s Christmas.)