Under The Bridge

Now here’s a clever-sounding workflow for whipping together some reasonably attractive non-standard GUI elements for your iPhone project in short order; particularly useful for trolls, who as artists are really good programmers, if you get our drift.

Turns out that Keynote, which chances are fairly good you probably have on your machine even if you didn’t realize it as part of iWork, is very good at creating custom buttons and the like.

Then he recommends you just shimmy the shapes Keynote produces through the Acorn image editor, which apparently handles them quite gracefully — we wouldn’t know, so far we’ve found GraphicConverter the heartwarmingly geekiest of bitmap editors for us, but when we give this plan a whirl next time we want a funky button we’ll try out Acorn if GraphicConverter happens to not handle Keynote creations gracefully — et voilà, you have Xcode/IB-ready graphic files!

Easier to watch than describe, check out the video to see a demonstration.

We also note from the comments that OmniGraffle is suggested for this kind of designer-challenged design as well, so there’s another option.

h/t: iPhoneFlow!