The Breakroom
Category: Apps
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 […]
State of the Twitterverse
January 13, 2023
Last night at about 7:30pm PST, Twitterrific customers started reporting problems accessing Twitter via the iOS app. News quickly spread on Twitter and Mastodon that a wide range of third party apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon, and many others had been disabled. Strangely, Twitterrific for macOS continues to work normally. We cannot say for certain […]
The Year In Review for 2022
December 16, 2022
More than any other year in recent memory, 2022 brought big changes—some good, some bad, and some sad. During our 25 years in business we’ve learned to roll with all manner of punches and continue forging ahead. This year was no different. Old Friends This year brought a string of notable updates to some of […]
Enchant Your Inktober with Linea Sketch
September 28, 2022
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 […]
