New 🌜Late Night Breakdown — Pinch to Zoom in Apple Maps

Hello techno-curious design friends~

My second newsletter! Welcome to the new folks who've signed up over the past week 🤠, and welcome back to OGs.

Workshop recap

I ran the 2nd day of the beta workshop this past Saturday, which was about Encoding Interfaces as Textual Data. I changed the format based on participant feedback — instead of a live demo and small group breakouts, I prepared lecture slides and had small activities sprinkled in that we did together in Figjam. It was super fun, and you can see some of the slides and read about some learnings in this Twitter thread.

Late Night Breakdown #2

This week, I'm cursed by the canker fairy, but had time to break down a fundamental building block of modern touch interfaces — pinch to zoom! We look through the lens of Apple Maps to think about how computers take touch input and translate that into scales and rotations for a map or other visual element.

🎥 Watch the video here!

Interesting links

For the 2nd day of the workshop, I assigned homework readings, and I'd love to share those with you here!

• Rendering Performance breaks down the pipeline for web browser rendering, touching on ideas that are common in many modern graphics pipelines
• Figma Bidirectional text support is a great Twitter thread that breaks down how bidirectional text support works, and the challenges to implementing it
• Code- vs Data-driven displacement discusses different ways to make video game characters move realistically. My favorite part of this is at the end, where the easiest solution is to just don't show the feet! It reminds me that often with good technical intuition, you can quickly identify issues that you can side-step 😝
• Building a button breaks down how complex the humble button actually is to make accessible
• Code alignment chart is an alignment meme I saw today — enjoy!

Question of the week

What are some inspirational microinteractions or software you've seen recently? What are some technical concepts that have confused you? Reply to this email and I may be able to break it down!

I hope you all are having a wonderful spring (or autumn) — see you around on the web ^_^

Julius Tarng

@tarngerine • Dallas, TX • Apr 21, 2022