When will Swift 3 and Swift 2.3 be available in PaintCode?
We aim to release a new version of PaintCode with Swift 3 and Swift 2.3 support in October.
I really need to use Swift 3 right now, what should I do?
We have a private beta version available to those of our customers who have urgent need for Swift 3.
If you wish to participate in our private beta, please contact us at support@pixelcut.com.
If I buy PaintCode right now, will I get Swift 3 and Swift 2.3 support for free once the new version is released?
All customers who bought PaintCode after June 1st, 2016 will receive the new version with Swift 3 support as a free update.
Open a Sketch document you want to export to Swift or Objective-C code.
After successfully installing the PaintCode plugin in the previous step,
there should be a "PaintCode" menu item under the "Plugins" application
menu:
The video above provides a detailed step-by-step guide on how to use the generated code.
This article provides a summary for more advanced users. The provided code examples are
in Swift, but all information below also applies to Objective-C.
This video demonstrates how to draw the Apple Watch activity rings in PaintCode.
With variables, it is even easy to make the activity rings parametric. Download PaintCode document.
You can now export animated sequences - multiple PNGs or a GIF file - directly from PaintCode.
Great for Apple Watch animations!
Just make your canvas parametric using a variable, then choose the minimal and maximal value of that
variable and other settings in the new export UI.
5. Copy & paste support from Sketch, Illustrator, Pages
6. Live shape thumbnails in the Shapes & Groups browser
7. New multithreaded renderer
We've rewritten our canvas renderer from the ground up. The new multi-threaded rendering
engine is considerably faster when working with large and complicated canvases.
8. Support for cut, copy & paste of entire canvases
9. Support for canvas multi-selection
You can now select multiple canvases at once and change their properties (such as their size and export settings)
en masse.
10. New way to find out where your library items are used
To learn where a particular library item (such as color) is being used in your document, pick the "Show Usage"
option from the contextual menu.
11. New, easy way to replace one library item with another
Sometimes, you want to replace one color with another one in your entire document.
Just pick the right replacement from the contextual menu. This works for all library items - colors, gradients, shadows, images and variables.
12. Replace Symbol with its content
It is now possible to "unpack" a symbol. You can easily replace the symbol by its content using the contextual menu.
13. Improved PSD and SVG import
PaintCode now automatically detects common shapes such as ovals, rounded rectangles, regular polygons and stars
and imports them as these shapes instead of beziers.
14. Canvas Arrangement
To arrange multiple canvases in a grid, column or a row, simply select then and use the contextual menu.
15. Built-in feedback form
We've built in a convenient feedback form directly into PaintCode, so that you can easily send us bug reports, suggestions and tips for improvement.
PaintCode 2.2 introduces Smart Symbols, a great feature for prototyping entire user interfaces.
Symbols allow you to reuse your drawings across a document.
Symbols can be nested, and you can even make them parametric and resizable,
which means that PaintCode has the best support for symbols of any drawing app on Mac.
Symbols Tutorial
We’ve put together a short video tutorial that shows you how to use Symbols.
Draw something on a canvas
Anything you want to reuse many times across your document. An icon, button, slider or other UI control.
Few days ago, Apple introduced iPhone 6 Plus. The new iPhone substantially changes the way graphics are rendered on screen. We've made an infographic to demystify this.
Line rendering
To demonstrate different rendering of pixels on various devices, we compare how 1-point wide line is rendered on
Original iPhone - without retina display. Scaling factor is 1.
iPhone 5 - with Retina display, scaling factor is 2.
iPhone 6 Plus - with Retina display HD. Scaling factor is 3 and the image is afterwards downscaled from rendered 2208 × 1242 pixels to 1920 × 1080 pixels.
The downscaling ratio is 1920 / 2208 = 1080 / 1242 = 20 / 23. That means every 23 pixels from the original render have to be mapped to 20 physical pixels. In other words the image is scaled down to approximately 87% of its original size.
After Apple introduced Swift at WWDC, it became clear that this is the future of Apple software development.
We started to work on Swift code generation for PaintCode immediately.
Today, we're very excited to finally make PaintCode 2.1
available. Here is a video of PaintCode 2.1 running the Swift code generator:
Our experience with Swift has been very positive so far - congratulations to Chris Lattner
and his entire development team for this great work!
In addition to Swift code generation, PaintCode 2.1 also adds parametric colors, gradients, shadows and images.
This means that you can now, for example, configure PaintCode color to behave as a method parameter in the generated code.
This allows you to easily change the color (and other style characteristics) of your PaintCode drawings at runtime.
PaintCode 2.1 is a free update, available immediately on the Mac App Store and our own Store.
To learn more about PaintCode 2, visit our website.
We have prepared video tutorials that show PaintCode 2 in action. To catch all PaintCode-related news, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Christian, tell us something about you and your company
My name is Christian Dangl. I'm a mobile developer with a specialism in iOS and Windows development.
We're a small team of developers with a wide range of skills. We always aim to get the maximum from our apps for our clients, as well as for our own products.
We love to develop specialized apps with more complex architecture, and try to avoid yet another ToDo app.
I'd say that yes, I'm addicted to coding, and I try to combine that with my passion for music and sports.
PaintCode has supported us not only as a company, but also as individuals in developing an even better experience in nearly all our apps.
You just released m.phase app for iPad. What is the purpose of m.phase, and what was the idea behind it?
m.phase is all about giving musicians and sound engineers a new and unique experience of controlling a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) using gestures.
m.phase is all about giving musicians and sound engineers a new and unique experience of controlling a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) using gestures.
We set out to create a product that gives users the opportunity to focus more on the actual sound or video being edited, rather than concentrating on working with small knobs and faders.
All controllers are basically the same, so we wanted to be and think differently... I guess we all know that special phrase...
What can you do with these gestures?
With the gestures of m.phase, you can easily change volume, pan, mute/solo, use transport controls and much more... all without having to touch a specific control on your screen.
Besides the ability to operate it without looking, you can also use multiple gestures simultaneously in an even easier way than before. For example, changing volume and pan of 2 channels at the same time.
The only thing remaining was to create a user interface that would match our idea. That's where PaintCode helped us to implement an awesome user interface - in an incredible amount of time.
You used PaintCode a lot when developing m.phase - can you tell us more about it?
When we started to think about designing m.phase, Andreas Huber and I were kind of lost at the beginning.
All our team members had their own visions - about abstract controls and how they could look.
But no one could have really imagined how to develop such a user experience, while retaining the main focus on programming our core engine…because that's what we wanted to end up with…good core functionality!
PaintCode worked so well and so fast that we literally made a sport out of it. We used it for every control, icon and other graphical concept in our app.
We asked our designer Raimund Schumacher to assist with the UX. As soon as he had presented the first design proposal, we immediately thought about proceeding with PaintCode.
I was already familiar with this software from earlier projects, but I never thought I would ever build a complete application out of it.
We started by creating the main element (Volume Sphere), and we were almost shocked how similar it looked to the original design.
After creating the control, we split it into sub-parts and easily combined them in our source code, where it was brought to life by adding animations and effects. We then gave it a finishing touch by creating different shadows.
We adjusted, replaced, and thoroughly checked them until we were completely satisfied.
PaintCode worked so well and so fast that we literally made a sport out of it. We used it for every control, icon and other graphical concept in our app.
After finishing the main application, we added the option to set custom colors for the channels.
Because we use Basic Colors and Derived Colors, it was a simple change and everything worked within a short period of time.
We ended up with a 2.5 MB file size of our application. The sheer size of the app speaks for itself.
m.phase is not your first app. Could you tell us a bit about your other apps?
Yes, besides m.phase there have been a few other apps that we're proud of.
Almost every app has had some kind of makeover in the last year.
“Sumit & be fast” is a fun game for kids and adults that helps to improve mental arithmetic, and since Version 2.0 is also based on PaintCode drawings.
“Live Score” is a professional sports team software, which helps teams to create digital scoreboards for TV broadcasts, live streams, websites and other platforms. The iOS Remote apps allow scorers to simultaneously publish the game's progress on all platforms.
The available Web Widgets for the team websites were made with WebCode by PixelCut.
Besides developing software, we also have our own lighting hardware solution, “m.pulse smart lighting”, which can be built into homes, lamps or used at certain events. The iOS app was created without PaintCode. Had we used it, we would have also saved quite a lot of time developing that software.
“A's Baseball” has been developed for the professional baseball team “Attnang-Puchheim Athletics” over the last couple of years, and has now grown into something I would call “MLBs little brother”. It gives you intense insights into games and standings, with special game day features, push notifications, and way more.
Two years ago, we launched the first version of PaintCode because we
desperately needed something like it. And as it turned out, we weren't alone.
PaintCode has quickly become one of the most popular developer tools on Mac -
adopted by industry giants such as Apple, Disney Pixar, Evernote, Hewlett Packard,
Qualcomm and many others.
We remember reading Wil Shipley's blog for many years, dreaming about becoming Mac developers one day. You can imagine our reaction when we received an email from Wil, a legend of our industry, shortly after we had launched PaintCode. The subject of the e-mail was: "PaintCode looks genius".
We are incredibly thankful to all our customers for making our dreams come true.
Today, we are proud to introduce PaintCode 2. We have been working on it
non-stop for over a year, and we're really excited to be finally showing it to you.
Our goals for PaintCode 2
Super simple integration of the generated code into your projects. (with StyleKits)
Aside from the app icon, PaintCode does not use any image resources. We could test countless variations of our new UI in a very short time. It's hard to imagine doing what we have done without PaintCode 2. We really look forward to what you'll achieve with it.
Pricing and Availability
PaintCode 2 is available for purchase. You can still buy it from the Mac App Store, and we've also
added the option to buy directly from us, including volume purchase options.
If you bought the previous version of PaintCode (1.3.3) after 01 April 2014,
please contact us at support@pixelcut.com and we'll give you a free license
for PaintCode 2.
To learn more about PaintCode 2, visit our website.
We have prepared video tutorials that show PaintCode 2 in action. Want to catch all PaintCode-related news? Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
We hope that you'll like PaintCode 2 as much as we do!
Peter Rapp, the creator of Lightbow, uses PaintCode to draw beautiful dynamic light bulbs. He was kind enough to let us include an interactive example1 in this interview, so you can play with it, too:
Short story: We’ve decided to open source some Objective-C categories for drawing the new iOS 7 rounded rectangles. Code download below!
Long story: In iOS 7, Apple introduced a slightly different icon shape - it is no longer a simple rectangle with circular arcs in corners. The old design produced a subtle but noticeable “hump” in places where arc touches some of the straight lines. The new iOS 7 icon shape looks more “organic” and eliminates this effect.
Tell us a bit about yourself, your apps and your work.
I'm the lead developer and operations manager at Guided Ways Technologies Ltd. We've been making mobile apps long before they were called 'apps'. Most notably, we're the developers of 2Do, which is available on iOS, Mac and Android.
When Pixel Film Studios released ProCutX earlier this year, the app got a lot of much-deserved attention. ProCutX lets you control Final Cut Pro X using your iPad. We interviewed Jon Beebe (@bejonbee), the developer of ProCutX.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
My name is Jon Beebe, I’m an iOS & front-end web developer. From a user’s perspective I remove worry from their lives and replace it with hope. From a technical perspective I bring business ideas to life on real devices, through code.
