We are proud to announce our updated UI control suite for iOS. We are helping developers enrich their products with premium, high quality controls and to meet the ever growing customer demands they are facing.

With everything moving so fast you need to keep your products up to date with new platform developments.

We believe that today it is not enough to just put a couple of fields on a page and you’re done. You’ll have to be thoughtful about context and what people are trying to accomplish using your products. We’ve written a number of posts on this topic where we dissect UI patterns that are relevant in the mobile age.

People don’t want to use apps because it looks good or just for the sake of using something. We are not using Facebook because it is cool, we are using it because we are craving for updates, we want to be on top of what is happening around us. We are hiring products we use for a multitude of jobs.

The expectation of users is much higher than before, they want to get stuff done and they are expecting it to be simple. What worked two years ago, might not work today. Because there are so many stellar products like the iPhone or Google Search that consumers use on a daily basis, their expectations are growing.

Mobiscroll released the first version of the iOS controls a couple of years ago, then updated it to more modern look when iOS7 was released. It was time to rethink how these controls are rendered to meet the requirements of users and developers

Give your users super powers by making it easy for them to get the job done.

Native controls are limited

While you can do a lot of great things with native HTML5 inputs (and you should!) there are many things you cannot do. The browsers ship with their own implementation of the controls and for a generic use-case they are perfect. There are inconsistencies however and things that you cannot accomplish with only plain HTML elements. This is where you need custom tools that rely on technologies that give you ways to customize the experience – like Javascript and CSS. I am not just talking about colors and font weights, I am talking about a fully tailored UX.

So what happens when you need to refine the user experience to fit your business rules? You need to limit dates and times to opening hours or help the user pick from a range of values.

• You can work around with the native html controls, have several alerts, warnings and steps. So if people want to purchase a plane ticket you would use several select inputs. This is usually not a good solution. It will get the data in, however it confuses users and make the process hard to grasp. Instead of thinking in terms of data tables and things you need store for successful reservation you need to think in terms of how success looks like for the user.
• Building it in house. This works if you have the expertise, time and resources which ultimately translates to added cost. Unfortunately this doesn’t stop at an implemented first version. So when you think about building your own solution you should double your estimate and add in maintenance time. This will be your responsibility, your code to maintain. You will have full control at the expense of a much higher cost.
• You can look for tools that help you tailor the experience. This is the most common option. People usually open up google and search for a solution to their problems where they get bombarded with a plethora of options. So what’s wrong with what’s out there? One of the issues is the inconsistency with the overall experience of the OS and the product as a whole. The second problem is that while there are a lot of great open source projects out there, there are not for everyone. We are fans of open source and we truly believe that it is moving the industry forward with unparalleled speed, however for most businesses open source is not the best option. Because of project abandonment, no support, no handle for edge cases and hard to integrate solutions quickly throw you in the realm of “building it yourself”.

Most of the tools and UI frameworks have a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to UI controls.

They provide some customization, but are miles away from what you’d need to get the truly refined UX your customers are demanding.

We want to make this better by providing highly polished UI controls that you can customize to fit your exact needs. Not a generic solution, but tailored to your use case. This is why we took on to rebuild our iOS theme with 3D scrolling and refine all controls, so that they look and feel native even thou they are built with Javascript. You can use them with your favorite framework and tools. It was a challenge to have that same great look and performance as the native controls, but the effort we put was worth it.

Looking in the future

We want you to be one step ahead of the competition. Apple is experimenting with dark interfaces maybe because it will be much more energy efficient on new hardware or maybe because it’s easier to read in certain scenarios. It is probably both, so we want to give you the tools so that you can build your dark UI. With the new Dark theme, we’ll make it easy for to do just that. This was possible because we built our controls to be fully customizable and themable from the ground up.

As things move forward pretty fast, we’ll have to adapt our products to fit with the new design guidelines and not just that but to improve on them. Besides providing you with the best looking UI components out there we are working on making it customizing and using them as easy as possible. We also take steps towards a tighter integration with front-end tools. Keep an eye out for new updates!

You can try the new UI controls for iOS here right now.

Image credit: Lucian Novosel from the Noun Project.

If you are looking for quick, no-hassle solutions that can be literally implemented in minutes, check out the products we provide at Mobiscroll.