[Computing for Designers] New 🌞 High Noon Breakdown — Dynamic Labels in Apple Maps

Happy end of April, techno-curious design friends~

This marks the third newsletter~ I was a bit under the weather last week, which is why this is coming at you late! Here are some updates from the community since we last talked...

New Breakdown Video!

This is our most complicated breakdown yet, where we delve firmly into the "guesswork" territory of breakdowns and reverse engineering. I walk through how mapping software decides when to show or hide labels as you zoom and pan around a city. We discuss:

• 🍄 Super Mario Bros. collision boxes
• 🗺 community-sourced OpenStreetMaps data
• 🧠 the practice of breakdowns and reverse engineering

🎥 Watch the video here! This video clocks in around 30 minutes, so I definitely recommend watching @2x :)

Beta workshop concluded!

We wrapped up the initial beta cohort day 3 workshop~ I learned a lot, but definitely burned out a bit making slides and running workshops for 3 weeks straight. This final workshop I walked through a real application I built the first version of, called Sprout. I broke down the overall architecture, as well as specific microinteractions like the face dock, and discussed multiplayer concepts. We had an open Q&A at the end and a retrospective on the workshop and what we want the future of the "community" to be!

What's next?

As for future workshops... I'll need to recover a bit. I'd like to focus on making videos for a while to experiment with that format. If I can be a little vulnerable here, content creation can be fairly painful — I've burned out before on an entire craft (illustration) due to this type of pressure. The thing that helps keep me going is: focusing on my own learning and experimentation, and trying to place less emphasis on external expectations and perfection.

If you have any advice with managing this type of pressure, I'd love to hear!

Interesting links

• Explaining APIs through filing cabinets — a funny moment in the big Oracle vs Google "Java is patented" lawsuit where the lawyers had to explain what an API is to a non-technical jury. If you ask 10 engineers to explain APIs you'll get 10 different answers...
• Imperative vs Declarative programming — this is a bit more technical of a concept, but if you learn about programming these days you'll probably hear these terms thrown about. It's not an either, or — most declarative programming languages are backed by imperative implementations (see: CSS -> the browser renderer parses this declarative format and handles it imperatively in C++)
• How to build smooth zooming in Google Maps — Very relevant to our maps breakdowns! Maps app didn't always have smooth, fractional zooming. They all used to have stepped zooming! This article explains how one might build smooth zooming (back before they added it) to Google Maps.
• Runway ML Video Editor Graphics Pipeline — Software interface programming is very abstracted from graphics programming, but understanding more graphics concepts can always help you come up with clever ideas in interfaces. This breakdown of a machine-learning video editor application shows what cool effects you can create if you set up a pipeline that preprocesses a video into different formats to help you produce different effects.
• An ode to Bezier Curves — when we all learned to use the pen tool, we were all so confused. Its indirect manipulation at its finest. Eventually designers build up an intuition based on feel — but what are the mathematics backing up this type of curve? A wonderful video!

Prompt of the week

When's the last time you sat down with an engineer peer to discuss how the software you design is engineered? What are the pieces of the architecture and how are they assembled? I challenge you to sit down and diagram this out!

See you around on the web ^_^

Julius Tarng

@tarngerine • Dallas, TX • Apr 28, 2022