Over the past few days I did a bit more work on Slate. I must say, it doesn’t really get regular attention. But it’s still improving!
The main feature I’ve been working on is the support for themes. I previously laid the ground work for this, with the three options being light, dark, and true black.
The app was originally designed to have a dark theme, so the way I’m initially testing it, is by analysing the colours as I go, while having the theme preference set as the light theme. This way I get an obvious sign on what interface elements I’ve moved over to the new system. After the bulk is done, I can then fine tune the colours, and test every theme to make sure they’re perfect.
A benefit of trying to separate the formatting of interface elements, is that I’m making views more generic (I think I say this in very development log). But I want to get to a point where, every interface element e.g. a post in a table, someone’s profile, or just as generic as a text field, has an explicit style. So the actual main application logic will just be placing these already formatted interfaces, in the right sections, with the correct data.
I do already have a lot of this going on in the app, with the conversation list, list of a user’s following, and a few other things, all using the exact same view controller. All it needs is an array of any type of object, and then it just asks the CellFactory for a cell that will suit it, and then it presents it.
As you can see form the screen shot, the profile view is looking a bit odd at the minute. It’s a mix of the colours and layout I think. I will definitely need to do some work on this.
And, one thing I keep forgetting about. I still need to work on inline images. They don’t actually appear at all at the minute, so it’s not even in a usable state for just reading Micro.blog!
It’s getting better though! Unfortunately, I’m just doing it a bit slowly.