Launch Pad

Securely Storing Data on iOS

Mobile devices and apps have access to a vast amount of personal information. As app developers, we need to be cognizant of the data the apps we build handle and safeguard it accordingly.

design

iOS Accessibility Part 1: Dynamic Type

It's more important than ever to consider all the different ways to make your app accessible to everyone and ensure an inclusive experience. Here are a few ways iOS developers can make their apps more accessible.

faq

FAQ: Should My iOS and Android App UIs Be The Same?

Clients and prospective clients often come to us with similar questions. One of the top ones is "should my iOS and Android app UIs be the same?" Here's our hot take.

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.

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.

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

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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