The Breakroom

Our last release of Tot introduced a new feature called Smart Bullets. These special bits of text made it easy to create lists where you could check off items. (Check out “What’s New?” in the app help and you’ll get a quick demo.) One shortcoming with Smart Bullets was that you needed a mouse to […]

October returns once again with an orange armful of pumpkin spice, a crisp autumn breeze, and a way to channel our creativity every day of the month. Inktober encourages artists, both amateur and professional alike, to pick up pen and pencil and express themselves by crafting a drawing each day based on the official list […]

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 […]

What’s New? Wallaroo!

September 12, 2022

Introducing Wallaroo – the quickest and easiest way to browse and set wallpapers on your iOS devices. The Iconfactory has been crafting custom wallpapers for the Mac and iOS community for over 25 years, and now we’ve packaged them up in a fun, handy app that’s available today on the iOS App Store. Wallaroo comes […]

Now through August 31st, we’re offering a 30% discount on two of our most popular productivity tools – Tot for note takers and xScope for designers and developers. Saving a bit of cash is always welcome, even if you’re not a student, so be sure to head to the App Store to pick up Tot […]

Gaming the System

August 1, 2022

Those industrious bots are back with an update to our fast-paced puzzler, Frenzic: Overtime. Whizbot’s Test Lab Daily Challenge has received an upgrade to include all new exciting bonuses and strategies as you compete to be the top bot world wide. The Test Lab now also makes it easier to see the players immediately above […]