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Design in wearables will finally arrive.

About a year ago, I wrote an article on how design is critical to the success of wearable devices. And now, this finally happens: TNW reports that Google set up a partnership with the Luxottica Group, the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley. Now, Google Glass may finally loose its image of being a nerdy looking device. I’m really curious about how these devices will look like. As common design companies start their activities, the best is yet to come. So, glasses will start to look like glasses rather than computers attached to glasses.

Besides the  Glass thing, Google announced a new Android project especially for wearables. This platform for smart watches will partner with LG, Motorola and -which is most interesting- Fossil. The time of wearing tech-looking screens on your wrist will be over, soon. There will be more choice for customers and the kind of wearable you have might become a matter of style. Customers will definitely welcome these changes in design and sales of smart-watches will increase.

In the end, we will finally win really good looking and useful products: People will all look like people in the end and not like robots. This is a key factor in the success of wearables.

And still, what is Apple about to do? After a year there is still no wearable iOS-device. Design has always been the (most) important part of  their products. There is rumors and also some inventions and patents for wearable technology but still no evidence about a release soon to come.

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Adding multiple buttons to UINavigationItem

I recently needed to add several buttons to a UINavigationItem in my iOS 6 app. All documentation I found only spoke about the standard buttons on a UINavigationItem which are backBarButtonItem, leftBarButtonItem and rightBarButtonItem. Well, not enough for me: I needed 2 buttons to be displayed on the left side of my navigation.

After hours of searching, reading and trying I found this. Maybe somebody else might need it, too:

NSMutableArray *buttons = [[NSMutableArray alloc]initWithCapacity:2];

UIBarButtonItem *button1 = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc]initWithTitle:@”button1″ style:UIBarButtonItemStylePlain target:self action:@selector(myLittleAction)];
UIBarButtonItem *button2 = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc]initWithTitle:@”button2″ style:UIBarButtonItemStylePlain target:self action:@selector(myOtherAcion)];

[buttons addObject:button1];
[buttons addObject:button2];
[self.navigationItem setLeftBarButtonItems:buttons];

So easy and yet it took me so long to set up… 🙂

With this approach you lose the standard back button for navigation. But there’s help. In the method myLittleAction I did this:

UIViewController *prevVC = [self.navigationController.viewControllers objectAtIndex:self.navigationController.viewControllers.count-2];
[self.navigationController popToViewController:prevVC animated:YES];