Category: News

When you design with SwiftUI directly, you design with the smarts that are built into iOS. Something we’ve wanted to do from the beginning was enable designing with real Apple Maps MapKit views directly inside DetailsPro. With our latest update, this is finally possible!

This feature requires the upgraded version of DetailsPro. If you haven’t upgraded yet, this is a great time to do so!

DetailsPro’s support for designing with Apple Maps is extensive—there’s support for Dark Mode, adding pins to the maps, finely adjusting the map’s frame in your design, and searching for places to quickly and easily center the map on your point of interest!

Download the latest DetailsPro update and upgrade to design with Maps.

We’ve been hard at work improving DetailsPro and making it into the product we dreamed up from the beginning. There are so many improvements in our latest update, version 3.0, that we wanted to write this post to highlight our favorites.

You can get the latest version of DetailsPro for free on the App Store and design forever with up to 5 files at no cost.

Inline editing
You can design refined, beautiful SwiftUI interfaces with our all-new editing UI that maximizes interface control and context. Expand and edit multiple SwiftUI modifiers simultaneously. Browse through SF Symbols, colors from the Human Interface Guidelines, and more all while viewing your work in-progress.

New visuals for SwiftUI concepts
Use SwiftUI to design to your fullest potential with helpful and accessible labeling and visuals we’ve added throughout. Our new visuals include, for example, beautiful and highly-communicative icons for concepts like Alignment. We’re really excited to be addressing universal needs like these, for those who prefer images in their tools. This is also another step we’re taking to make DetailsPro more global and less reliant on English language reading.

Faster Live Preview
We’ve refined the animation timing across the board from our design editing interface to our live preview—everything is snappier and more responsiveness to keep up with your design process.

New Gradient Picker
You can skip the difficult process of making good gradients—no more hunting around for the right colors or trying to guess which direction the gradient would look best in. Our new gradient picker introduces visual previews in every direction that you can preview and select from live as you edit your colors. With just a tap, you can explore gradient directions and find which one feels best in less time than ever.

New Font Picker
Designing with typography is a sacred experience. Okay, maybe some designers see it a little more casually and pragmatically than that, but for others, this is where all the fun begins.

Our subtly updated picker has simplified the experience and kept our philosophy in tact: it’s as easy as it could be for you to select a beautiful typography style from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Explore different font families and weights and instantly see your options update live. Finally, you can select a custom size if you are looking for something that isn’t included in the system styles. We have a lot of fun spending hours obsessing over the details of just this font picker—we wouldn’t be a niche Apple design tool if we didn’t. Now, we can’t wait to spend more time hearing your feedback and improving this super-high traffic part of our design interface.

New Color Picker
Just like our new font picker, our new-and-improved color picker sharpens the same focus on the needs of the Apple designer. You can now quickly and seamlessly design across the semantic colors provided by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and custom colors you’ve added in yourself with fewer taps and in a more compact, visual UI.

Opacity Shortcuts
You can zoom any design element between the most commonly-used opacity levels in interface design with our quick-access shortcuts for opacity. We love the window-shopping aspects of the design process and this fits right in to the speed we want to give you with every update.

Better SF Symbol Search
You can find the perfect SF Symbol now with our improved search algorithm and the improved compact UI for browsing the categories and testing the image scales available.

… this is just the beginning!
This update was a huge update for us as we refined the entire design experience and introduced new, niche detail for the Apple designer throughout even our most boring corners (we still love you, opacity modifier). This is just the beginning for our summer releases. We are hard at work on design versions, folders and tags, reusable designs, copy and paste, and more.

Thank you for designing with DetailsPro and always sending us your feedback! If you’d like to stay up-to-date on everything DetailsPro, follow us on Twitter @detailsproapp.

We want to make SwiftUI accessible to more people around the world. Our love of design is at the heart of this goal. Today, we are excited to announce a feature that makes DetailsPro even more flexible for the way designers and developers work: SwiftUI Playground export.

You can now export any design and open it instantly in Swift Playgrounds. See the impact of Swift code you’re working on with a beautiful SwiftUI preview; study the basics by learning from your own designs; prepare educational playgrounds with beautiful SwiftUI views built right in—all with designs made moments earlier in DetailsPro.

Day-in and day-out, we think about everyone from the curious kid working on their first app to the Apple designer working on the future of iOS. Thanks to SwiftUI, there is a new medium to create beautiful designs with that reveals itself to you as you explore.

We believe there is great promise here. Thanks to SwiftUI, a stunning design can be made with just a stack, a couple lines of text, and an image. We fit into this picture by giving designers, developers, and curious creatives around the world an easy way to get started.

To that end, we are always going to work hard to support the diversity of workflows that people have. From the beginning, we’ve been focused on supporting many ways to take your work with you out of DetailsPro.

You can already export designs as JPEGs and transparent PNGs to use in presentations, documents, and other design tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. You can also export designs as Swift files ready for import into Xcode. We’re proud to add Swift Playgrounds as another option today and are eagerly looking forward to what comes in the future.

Exporting Swift Playgrounds requires DetailsPro 2.12.1 (available on the App Store). To export a Swift Playground, open a design, tap •••, and tap Export as SwiftUI Playground.

We found a number of areas where we could make loading, interaction, and animation smoother than before. DetailsPro is a 100% native app written in SwiftUI, optimized for the M1 chip and the latest iPhones and iPads on iOS 14. With this update, we greatly reduced DetailsPro’s memory usage and CPU usage so you should feel the app is snappier and faster than before.

9to5Mac published an article about DetailsPro today. I am so thankful for this writeup and I am so excited to see the app out for designers and developers to finally try. This is only the beginning.

Hello and welcome to the very beginning of something new!

We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the nearly one thousand people who helped shape the earliest version of DetailsPro by joining the beta. All of your feedback has been worth gold to us. Truly, maybe more than gold.

As DetailsPro 1.0 is officially available in the App Store for free, the focus of the next six months turns to filling in the gaps that we see across the app and continuing to make life easier for designers.

We are very proud of DetailsPro and the community that has formed around it. We want to make fresh, creative, productive, and enjoyable SwiftUI design an experience that is accessible to anybody who wants to sit down and dream up a wonderful design.

Let us know what you think!