Not much to show for today except from the fact that I made the detail sheet to actually work. Also fixed the pixel guide problem I’ve written about yesterday: I’ve moved it off-center by 30 pixels and made Due and Deadline labels gray instead of heavy black, which made quite a difference!

Thinking about making the header into a dynamic slider, as the pictures are often taller than necessary. In this way if you slide the view down, margins around the grayed-out area on top will become wider to show more of the image. Not sure how to do it though and it’s not at the top of my priority list at the moment.

Had a blast (as in I said “Blast!” all day long) today with making a detail screen for homework assignments.

Among other things I needed to find a way to use Autolayout to balance three labels, one on the left, two on the right on top of each other, around the center of a Table View cell. After some trying I settled on a “pixel guide”: a pixel-sized empty image sitting right in the center of a cell, with label balanced equally to its sides. Works fine.

Again, not quite sure on this heavy black background for the due/deadline label, but I have an idea that I’m going to try tomorrow.

Feeling like a total noob every day!

I’m not really happy with the progress on the app I’m writing, but that’s more of me being a newbie in development than anything else :)

A couple of days ago I’ve read a not particularly well-named article “The 15-minute daily habit that will change your career”, where the artist Austin Kleon is cited:

“I recommend that everybody come up with a daily dispatch,” says Kleon. And it’s nothing terribly involved: Kleon recommends spending 15 or 30 minutes at the end of each day selecting and sharing something on your social networks. That’s it.

“What I mean by that is one little bit of media that you push out every day, some little piece of your process that you share with people,” he says. Set yourself a daily goal: one photo on Instagram, tweeting the favorite sentence you read that day, doing a blog post about something you love.

That actually makes sense for me, I’m usually too deep in my shell to show unfinished work to the outside world. A perfectionist trait, but as then-37 Signals quoted, “shipping beats perfection”, so there you go.

Today I’ve been doing some list display work and used some icons from the four iOS icon sets by Pixeden.

First, I used a simple [NSString stringWithFormat:@“🎓 %@”, topicId.name] incantation and got this:

The graduation cap didn’t work all too well though, especially with my effort to deemphasize color use and flatten the app. Plus I’ve read that since iOS 7 emoji stopped scaling above 16px. That’s when I came over Pixeden’s icons and replaced the emoji graduation cap with an UIImageView. Tab bar icons are from these sets as well.

In horizontal layout the Due and Deadline labels look too far off, yet I don’t want to move them over to the left, the line would be too heavy. Oh well! We’ll see.