The Breakroom

Why Tapestry?

February 14, 2024

Even in the early days of the Internet, finding and keeping track of the pages you wanted to read could be difficult. Back then, adventurous individuals created their own personal web pages to keep a public log of the latest things happening in their lives. These web logs (aka blogs) spread like wildfire, and soon […]

Twitterrific: End of an Era

January 19, 2023

Twitterrific has been discontinued. A sentence that none of us wanted to write, but have long felt would need to be written someday. We didn’t expect to be writing it so soon, though, and certainly not without having had time to notify you that it was coming. We are sorry to say that the app’s […]

Wallaroo and SwiftUI (5 of 5)

September 23, 2022

We were getting near the end of Wallaroo development and the app was close to fully functional, but as mentioned at the tail of the previous post, there was still one more important thing that I had to figure out how to implement. The wallpaper detail view has a popup with metadata about the wallpaper you […]

Wallaroo and SwiftUI (4 of 5)

September 22, 2022

In the last post, I talked about overcoming some issues with Wallaroo‘s main gallery view, but unexpectedly even the simple wallpaper detail screen held its share of challenges! The biggest surprise for me was how much trouble I had implementing the paging view to swipe left and right between wallpaper variants. In UIKit it’s trivial […]

Wallaroo and SwiftUI (3 of 5)

September 21, 2022

Now that Wallaroo had a unique and good-looking main gallery view along with nice parallax and blurs and everything, my focus shifted to optimizing scrolling performance. The parallax and lazy custom layout seemed to perform just fine, but rendering the glyphs/buttons on each tile view as well as the actual wallpaper image seemed to be […]

Wallaroo and SwiftUI (2 of 5)

September 20, 2022

At the end of the previous post of this series, Gedeon had just suggested that we add a parallax effect while scrolling through Wallaroo‘s gallery view. There’s nothing inherently complicated about parallax – it’s just moving a background layer at a different rate from the foreground. The real question was how the heck I was […]

Wallaroo and SwiftUI (1 of 5)

September 19, 2022

The Iconfactory has been releasing beautiful wallpapers on Patreon for years. Our latest app, Wallaroo, was built to make the process of browsing and using these hundreds of wallpapers more fun and convenient for everyone. Wallaroo is the first app we’ve built entirely with SwiftUI, so in this series of more technical posts, I want […]

Today’s update of Twitterrific for iOS modernizes menus, tweaks navigation structure, and improves some long-standing design limitations. All of the changes in this release are free and geared to make Twitterrific even easier to use. Main navigation has moved from the top to the bottom on both the iPhone and iPad screens. There are many […]

The Swipe Stuff

December 13, 2019

For many years, Twitterrific on iOS used a relatively simple custom presentation for modal popup views such as conversation threads and profiles. With the release of iOS 13, Apple changed the design of standard modal popup views to have a more card-like appearance and behavior. With this change, our custom popups still worked, but they […]