Category Archives: Design

Easing functions for your animations

Today’s design guidelines state that all animated movement inside your application should contain so called easing. You can read this section from google material design. If your UI-framework does not contain implementations for standard set of easings you can create your own.

Easing functions

Easing functions

Here is place where you can check out animated plottings for basic easing functions. And here you can find source code for them in several languages (JS,Java,Lua,C#,C++,C).

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Stackblur – C++ multi-threaded version of fast blur algorithm

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I found nice algorithm for blurring images – Stackblur by Mario Klingemann. It could do the job relatively fast and gives decent quality. You can check it here – web demonstration. As you can see it can be usable even in web projects.

As i wanted to include it to my cross-platform engine i found two c++ implementations:

First is SSE friendly, second contains some division optimization via static tables. However, both are not using all cpu cores. I took second one as foundation for my implementation, as i expected my code to work on mobile devices with no SSE support. Single-core processing of 1920×1200 rgba image with 100 px radius took only 219 ms (Intel Q9550, Windows 7).

I improved stackblur code to multi-threaded version – on my quad-core cpu speed results as expected showed 4x improvement – 63ms for the same task. You can download the part my lib below and use it as a foundation to your needs.

Download multi-threaded 32bit-color (RGBA) version of StackBlur: stackblur.cpp

I believe algorithm can be optimized even further – any suggestions are welcome.

Brief design guidelines for iOS 7

I have read new apple documents considering IOS7 application design. And here is very short list of features:

Main key features:

Full screen (Use whole screen of device).
Minimalism. No heavy shadows, bezels, gradients, etc. Borderless buttons.
A lot of white space.
Key color.
Single font (but dynamic size).
Minimalistic light single-color icons.
Dynamic layout with no fixed hardcoded sizes.

Specific Apple features:

Translucent elements hint content behind them. And here they mean specific blurred gradients.
Control center could be swiped from bottom of screen.

As you see – only last block of features is related to actual new apple platform. First list can be easily applied to Android or WP. So now apple tries to reach main market tendency to minimalistic design. Not something new. I wonder for how long this fashion will last, but at the moment that style is new standard across all mobile devices.

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This brief is based on “Designing for iOS 7” and “iOS 7 UI Transition Guide” official documents from apple development site.