A great episode by David and Katie on a topic that I cover frequently here at MacStories. I especially liked the focus on Drafts, which has become an essential part of my workflow thanks to the addition of Evernote actions.

Dan Frommer:

And it feels a bit more futuristic than the old nav-bars-of-square-buttons, in a Minority Report/Google Glass sort of way. Eventually, there might be a bunch of buttons hovering over our field of vision, on our car windshields, eyeglasses, wherever. This simulates that heads-up display effect.

Design trends come and go: some of them stick around, others are popular for a while but then slowly disappear as designers figure out better solutions. Remember when, after Instagram 1.0, dozens of apps started using large buttons in the middle of a toolbar? Or when pull-to-refresh could be seen in all sorts of designs?

Trends subside with time: new ones come out and gain traction, old ones re-surface with refreshed implementations. In the past few months, there seems to be a comeback of fun, entertaining pull-to-refresh animations after Apple’s default take with iOS 6. Two examples: Twitterrific 5 and the just-released Twitter Music.

The iOS ecosystem is now mature enough that we can recognize specific design patterns evolving and changing with time. I agree with Dan’s conclusion.

David Chartier details his workflow for iOS screencasts and GIF generation. I have exactly the same setup, especially when it comes to GIFs:

After you open or drag a video into GIF Brewery, you can select a small portion of the timeline to GIF; it’s really pretty simple. You have some control over how colors are squashed for the GIF format (it only handles 256 colors, so you might have to fiddle a bit here) and the GIF frame rate. You also get an overall file size meter and warning if you get close to or over 1MB; a number of of services (like Tumblr) and web hosts seem to not like anything over that, so GIFer beware.

I love GIF Brewery ; I’ve used it for several GIFs here on the site, and I’ve always liked its simplicity (and icon).

In addition to ScreenFlow, I would also suggest ffmpeg2theora, a simple converter for Ogg Theora video files. It’s a command line utility, and I use it every time I want to embed an HTML5 video on MacStories with MP4 and Ogg source files.

Obviously, Reflector is still the must-have for iOS screencasts.