The makers of PaintCode, a Mac app that turns vector drawings into native iOS drawing code, post release notes and iPhone screen guides.
HN commenters bring up PaintCode as a tool for vector UI that generates Objective-C, Swift or C#, and one commenter says they paid for it.
"there should be no fidelity loss"
Heh. Yes there will be, most notably on webpages, for example those with box borders defined as "1px solid" lines. The lines will look fuzzy and unequal. Check the last image at http://www.paintcodeapp.com/content/news/2014-09-11_iphone-6-screens-demystified/line.svg : it shows a "1 CSS pixel" line rendered as 2 black lines + 2 grey lines (one of the greys is very, very light). Some lines will not be interpolated the same way: some will be 2 black lines + 1 grey line, some will be 1 black line + 2 grey lines, and the shade of the 2 greys will be unequal and will vary depending on their precise alignment on the 1080p physical grid. The end result is that some lines will look slightly thinner/lighter or slightly thicker/darker than others. Heck, on my Nexus 5 which has an even higher PPI (445 PPI) than the iPhone 6+ (401 PPI) I can still clearly notice this effect, when holding the phone at arm's length (and I don't even have 20/20 vision), when simulating the downsampling that the 6+ is going to have to do. I can do it by zooming out[1] to simulate an effective pixel ratio of ~2.61, which is equivalent to what the iPhone 6+ is really doing graphically (1080 physical pixels wide / 414 logical pixels wide = ~2.61).
Contrast this with most Android devices where it is possible to get pixel perfect rendering because most (but not all) of them use a non-fractional pixel ratio (1.0, or 2.0, or 3.0, or 4.0) and to my knowledge none do downsampling…
Updates:
Just got an email from their team
Trial version of PaintCode
You can now download a limited trial version of PaintCode at http://paintcodeapp.com/trial.html
Video guides
We've prepared 4 short video guides demonstrating PaintCode in action.
These guides show various basic drawing techniques at: http://paintcodeapp.com/examples.html
Examples
You can also find examples of PaintCode documents at the same page.
Some of the examples include simple Xcode projects.
These projects utilize the drawing code generated by PaintCode.
Well you could use the usual Photoshop, illustrator .... But also check PaintCode it's a mac only app that helps create vector based UI (in objective-c) for iOs only.
Love to have something similar for Android (no sencha) 'cause the UI for android can be a serious pain.
Basically PaintCode can import svg and photoshop layers and convert them into objective c code. Which can be easily reused, and reconfigured for any new resolution that may come out.
It's not perfect but it's pretty neat http://www.paintcodeapp.com/
I wonder what takes up that much space in Photoshop. I suspect the brush files, iirc those take up quite some space. I can imagine Pixelmator uses much more native / vertex images, like those you can create using PaintCode [1], which generates a bit of native Objective C code to produce the image you draw in that app. Paintcode is a great way to reduce the size of your app's downloaded content, btw.
[1] http://www.paintcodeapp.com/
Most of the app bundle on iOS are various assets (.pngs, videos, sounds, etc). This looks like it's drawing everything in code, so the app bundle is really small.
Marco's new app, Overcast also has UI drawn almost entirely with code (all icons are generated with PaintCode [1]), and his app [2] is 4.5mb.
[1]: http://www.paintcodeapp.com
[2]: https://itunes.apple.com/pl/app/overcast-podcast-player/id888422857?mt=8
This is looking really nice. The "No Image" images on http://www.paintcodeapp.com/content/news/2014-09-11_iphone-6-screens-demystified/textRendering_2x.png look unintentional, though.
Edit: The 1x version looks fine: http://www.paintcodeapp.com/content/news/2014-09-11_iphone-6-screens-demystified/textRendering.png So this post only looks broken on retina screens, which is a bit ironic :-)