development

A collection of 17 posts

android

From RxJava to LiveData (and back?)

This photo has nothing to do with either RX or LiveDataDisclaimer: I'm no Reactive Extensions [http://reactivex.io/] (RX) expert. I'm simply a happy user with some (~6 years) experience with it. I've seen people struggling with RX. They say it has a steep learning curve. In that light, I was super excited when I first heard about Google's Android Architecture Components [https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/] (AAC) and LiveData [https://developer.android.com/topic/librarie

How We Built a Slack App in a Day
development

How We Built a Slack App in a Day

The Journey As a growing agency, with a quasi-distributed team, we needed a way for team members to quickly know if someone was on PTO, and do so with as little friction as possible. Since we already lived in Slack, having this functionality live their was a no-brainer. We evaluated a few existing solutions, but all of them were a bit heavy-handed, with features such as manager approval...etc. This really felt like it went against the ethos of our culture, so we did what any good engineering tea

iOS Universal Apps: Why and How
swift

iOS Universal Apps: Why and How

At Rocket we've developed many apps that need to support iPhone and iPad. Xcode provides built-in support for configuring universal apps, meaning that a single binary can adapt to, and be optimized for, both device types. But as is with any design pattern, making your app universal has its pros and cons. The Benefits * There is a single codebase. Code can be reused for the functionality that overlaps the iPhone and iPad versions of the app. A bug fixed in one app is a bug fixed in both.

How to Create a Navigation Transition Like the Apple News App
swift

How to Create a Navigation Transition Like the Apple News App

We at Rocket recently developed a new app for Barstool Sports which allows their users to consume its blog posts, podcasts, and videos. For this app, we decided to try to improve upon the default push/pop navigation animation by implementing a custom Apple News-like transition between the story feeds and story detail pages. Apple News Transition Here is the zoom transition that Apple uses within their News app: Default Push/Pop Transition And here's an example of the default push/pop animatio

Debugging iOS applications in the wild
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

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