Ashley Streb

Automated iOS Deployments with Fastlane

Typing in 17 different things to ship an app to the app store is old and busted. Hitting a button that does it all for you is the new hotness. Which do you prefer? What is fastlane Fastlane [https://fastlane.tools] automates the compile and deploy process for apps. It is free to use and makes the archive and submit process painless, automated and repeatable. 🎉 It was built by Felix Krause. It has been acquired by Twitter and is now part of fabric [https://get.fabric.io]. (hat tip to Felix)

Learning as we go: Building a distributed, multi-national product agency

Over the last five years, we have formed a truly global team. Without this distributed, multi-national team we would not be the fastest-growing product agency in the US. Here's what we've learned along the way.

mobile

The privacy imperative of digital contact tracing

Given the challenges of manual contact tracing, many countries and public health authorities have turned toward digital contact tracing and exposure notification solutions in the fight to end the pandemic.

epic fails

Why Some Projects Fail, and What We Can Learn From It

Recently, a potential client asked us what we have seen cause projects to go off the rails, and what we have learned from those experiences. Here are the common things that we've seen.

mobile

The Many Faces of Analytics

On too many projects the conversation around analytics goes something like this: Marketer: As we're getting close to the 1.0 launch of our new app can you put in these 370 events that we want to track in Google Analytics? Engineer: Sure I'll put them in. (Thinking at the same time that no one, ever will look at these events and thinks its a waste of time). Done, that's the entire conversation. A trite example as a set-up for the rest of this article? Sure. Mostly true a lot of times? Yep.

mobile

Install Dev and App Store Builds at Same Time

The Need After the 1.0 of your app has shipped it is time to start working on version 1.1. One thing you will want to do is install the app store version and the dev version on your phone. By default you will not be able to do this. The default Xcode project set-up assigns a single bundle ID for all builds of your app. Your phone only allows a single app with a particular bundle ID to be installed at a time. The Solution We want to set-up our project so that our development build and our rel

mobile

Practical Examples of 3D Touch (aka Power Moves)

The Promise In a previous blog post [https://blog.rocketinsights.com/3d-touch/] we stated how we thought 3D touch would lead to new types of interactions and app design. It would be a lie to say that 3D touch has fundamentally changed the way that apps are envisioned. However, 3D touch is slowly but surely starting to take hold. As Craig Federighi showed last week at WWDC, 3D touch is becoming pervasive: available from the lock screen, control center and, of course, available in apps (e.g., Ube

mobile

Simple, Sweet Locking Recipes

Any app of reasonable complexity has the need to synchronize and/or block thread execution until certain events have occurred. A lot of existing info on the internets references old or incorrect ways of locking/synchronizing. At Rocket we have almost completely standardized on Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) to accomplish our synchronization/locking. This consistent approach keeps things simple and easy to reason about. Here are several specific recipes for problems that we recently worked on.

hiring

How We Hire Developers

The most important thing Hiring is the most important thing you can do to build a great product and company. We've been lucky enough to help build teams at multiple global public companies. In doing so we've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. Hiring is something we discuss a lot at Rocket because we are always on the look out for exceptional talent. Additionally, our clients frequently ask for our help to define or refine their hiring process. We wanted to share what has worked fo

mobile

Coding Style Guides

At Rocket we have established coding style guides for all of the languages we work with. We wanted to share some of these guides and our rationale for having them. A good guide will make your code more readable and code reviews more pleasant. It will also promote good coding practices to everyone you work with, including new members of your team. Here is our Swift style guide. We'd love your feedback -- feel free to fork/modify etc. Swift Style Guide [https://github.com/rocketinsights/swift-s

apple

Initial thoughts on 3D Touch

Just last week Apple released their new iPhones [http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/] (6S and 6S Plus) and made bold statements around how great the new features were, claiming the addition of 3D Touch and a better camera make it worth upgrading. Better cameras are welcome, of course, but what about the 3D Touch feature? The press was gushing [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-apple-built-3d-touch-iphone-6s/] about it. But as designers and developers we were skeptical...could 3D touch real

ios

All Together Now... Multiple Storyboards

TL;DR Got multiple iOS developers? Use multiple storyboards. Highs and Lows Working on significant projects means working with a large code base and a multi-person team. Multi-person teams are fabulous for so many reasons -- code reviews, someone to bounce ideas off of and your nerf gun ally. However, one thing that is not fun about multi-person teams are source control conflicts. You finish a feature, got to merge/rebase and you get a conflict. Ugh! We almost exclusively use Storyboards for

development

Debugging iOS applications in the wild

As iOS developers we have lots of tools to debug our applications. However, debugging issues when the app is on a users device in the wild is much harder. If the application is suffering from a crash there are good tools to get data via (Twitter Fabric [https://get.fabric.io/], Crittercism [http://www.crittercism.com/], etc.). However, the problem becomes much harder when the app is impacted by a gnarly bug that impacts the user experience but does not actually crash the app. The best approach

teams

How to ensure color consistency across an iOS project

Note: This is the first in a series of posts on teams working together better. We'll be discussing issues around that important moment when your team starts a new project and you need to set the technical direction, establish a sound architectural foundation, and ensure consistency. Here is a tip for ensuring color consistency across an iOS project. Argh! Colors! As a man once famously said, 'Argh! Colors!'. They can be frustrating to get right! Here is what an iOS project usually looks like:

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