Launch Pad

Day One with Github Copilot

When I got my invite to the GitHub Copilot technical preview last week, I was excited to see what the AI Pair Programmer could actually do. This is what I found while trying to work with Copilot, with more anthropomorphism than I intended.

design sprints

Design Sprints to give startups a head start

Two of our Rocketeers took a trip to Brandeis University to lead a one-day workshop for Our Generation Speaks, empowering their fellows to jump start their start-ups with an introduction to design sprints.

development

Rust: More Than Just Performance

Rust has been voted Stack Overflow’s most loved language five years in a row. It is a hybrid between object-oriented and functional languages, and here are some of our favorite aspects of this much-loved language.

development

Why You Should Take Advantage of CSS Grid Layout

This article looks at the benefits of CSS Grid Layout and how you can put it to use in your next project.

API

Automatic API Documentation

Changes made to code should be automatically reflected in the documentation. So we built our own library to make sure that happens.

amazon web services

Deploying a WebSocket Application on Beanstalk

So, you've decided to deploy your Socket.IO application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. We're here to help address common challenges and questions that come up when deploying to Beanstalk.

react-native

React Native or Native? How to Decide in Two Steps

Is React Native the holy grail of cross-platform mobile development? Here are two steps you can take to find out if that's the case for your app.

podcast

[Podcast] Should You Build a Single Page Application?

In this episode of our Ship It podcast, we’re talking Single Page Applications, which enable the rich user experiences that people everywhere have come to expect.

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.

development

A Recipe for Building Successful Products

Throughout my career as a software developer I've seen many different ways of building products, and rarely does everything go smoothly. Here are my thoughts on what I’ve seen that makes a difference in improving the quality of products and reducing development failures.

Unity

Using Unity with Swift for AR

Unity is a cross-platform alternative to SceneKit when using ARKit in iOS. There are several advantages to embedding Unity in an existing Swift project, and we've put together a template for doing just that.

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

mobile

Mobile Continuous Integration Solutions

When buddybuild was acquired by Apple on January 2nd, the Rocket Android projects had a new problem to solve.

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

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.

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

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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