Something I’ve been interested in a lot lately is attempting to recreate existing User Interface components or User Interactions that are seemingly unique, complex and interesting enough to pique my interest. I get a little bit of enjoyment out of diving deeper into how they might work internally or the problems they might solve. I deliberately choose not to reverse engineer the source code to find out exactly how they were written, instead I try to think about how the component works from a visual perspective and I work backwards from there. …
When you’re developing applications for modern mobile devices, it’s vital that you consider the performance footprint that it has on older devices and in less than ideal network conditions. Fortunately Apple provides several powerful tools that enable Engineers to measure, investigate and understand the different performance characteristics of an application running on an iOS device.
Recently I spent some time with these tools working to better understand the performance characteristics of an eCommerce application and finding ways that we can optimize the experience for our users. …
This is not a prescription for the right way or wrong way of building software on product teams. In fact there is no such thing as a right or wrong way of working. Different practices work in different ways with different people on different teams. …
As with everything you do in life, it takes 10,000 hours to master what you’re doing. Or in the least to feel comfortable with it and to begin to feel proud of your output. I’ve been shooting terrible photos since early high school. I distinctly remember running home from school so that I could spend the afternoon flicking through camera and photography magazines looking at all of the expensive DSLRs and equipment that I couldn’t afford and probably wouldn’t ever need. …
When I’m not furiously swiping right on Tinder trying desperately to find the love of my life in a sea of random people I’ve never met, I’m building software and interfaces for the iPhone. As it turns out, Tinder actually pioneered an incredibly interesting and unique gesture-based interaction pattern that set the standard for many mobiles apps in the software industry today. …
Apple recently released iOS 11.0 to the public on September 19, 2017, bringing with it a plethora of API changes to system frameworks that every iOS Engineer interacts with on a daily basis — namely UIKit and Foundation.
This release came alongside the announcement of the iPhone X’s edge-to-edge display and gesture-based home button, which introduced entirely new interaction paradigms that required significant changes to UIKit to support.
It’s therefore important to understand exactly what has changed and why. Apple’s WWDC 2017 sessions do an incredible job of providing a lot of insight into these changes, but it can be…
If you didn’t already know, Apple announced an entirely redesigned iOS App Store experience this month at the WWDC conference. It has an increased focus on rich, in-depth, long form content over the previous interface which often tended to cram as many app icons as possible onto the screen at any one time. I recently wrote about the significance of the redesign, and admittedly my first impressions had me in love.
Skip forward to this weekend, I decided to spend some spare time diving a little deeper into the User Interface of the new App Store itself in order to…
Apple announced Xcode 9 along with Swift 4 during the Keynote and State of the Union last week in San Jose for WWDC 2017. One of the most significant changes that made it into the Swift 4 Standard Library is a series of protocols for Encoding, Decoding and Serialization of type instances that allow users to convert to and from JSON, as well as to and from the local disk. …
Phill Farrugia
Takes photos, writes words and codes things.
