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Shareshot 2.0.4 is in the App Store now, optimised for iPhone Duo. Here’s how our process of adopting iPhone Duo went. Spare a thought for indie devs who have had no access to the new hardware!

“Just dealing with the fold” already seemed daunting but turns out, there can be a lot more to it. Trying to make a rich editor-based app like this work on something sometimes much bigger than a phone but too small for full iPad apps is tough. It sometimes requires an “in-between” layout…

We use sidebar and inspector on iPad and Mac. These do work on Duo but the space you have left for content is not enough if you want to use both while seeing the content preview in open portrait pose.

So change #1 is the addition of a mini “input selector” built into the compact bottom sheet style inspector we use on the phone for times the sidebar can’t fit. This gives a Duo in closed or open portrait pose a layout like a regular phone.

Switching input image in a batch required closing and reopening the sheet every time without this mini selector. This is however a great improvement for regular iPhone users too. You tap a button in the inspector to reveal the input images.

Open landscape pose on Duo works like an iPad with both inspector and sidebar, although it is a little tight. We made it so the sidebar goes over the content preview in that pose, unlike on iPad and Mac.

Big change #2 was a surprise and actually came right at the end. When you have no screenshots open, we show big action buttons. This looks very empty on open poses so we had to rework it. We also needed to make it avoid the fold in landscape. We couldn’t do that for partial fold in portrait yet.

To help with this we reorganised them and added a section for ideas to help you learn what the app can do. We had to make them scrollable to handle open portrait post and various iPad sizes. Again this improved iPad/Mac too.

Avoiding the fold in open landscape meant we had to move all our bottom bar controls from a symmetric centered layout to a leading layout, notice the green indicator has moved when folded because it has more variable length.

The inspector caused a lot of pain, as the automatic conversion of it to a large modal when you close the device was bad, covering the preview. We had to do ugly things to detect the hinge closing and auto-hide the inspector but the result is pretty good. We’ll have to see it on a real device.

In order to ship we skipped compact landscape layout, as we don’t support this on the phone anyway. We may revisit that later but it’s very problematic — we need a large inspector area for the styling UI.