The Breakroom
Category: Wallaroo
It’s been a little over a year since we launched Wallaroo and to celebrate we’re offering a special discount for new customers. Taking advantage of this sale is easy. Just head to the App Store by opening this link on your iPhone or iPad to receive a 35% discount off the annual subscription price. And don’t wait […]
Wallaroo: A Journey from iOS to macOS (Part 3)
March 24, 2023
Another day, another set of revelations. We’ve almost reached our destination, so let’s get going! Tooling Problems SwiftUI and the cross-platform frameworks you will be using are either: A new thing with bugs and rough edges — and quickly evolving. An old thing with decades of legacy — and unlikely to change. You will have […]
Wallaroo: A Journey from iOS to macOS (Part 2)
March 23, 2023
It’s day two of our epic journey from iOS to macOS. Let’s get started with everyone’s favorite topic. Ugly Code In every app, there’s code you hate writing, but do it anyway. Shipping is better than perfection! Here are our less-than-proud moments in Wallaroo for the Mac: Handling URLs SwiftUI’s default mechanism for handling URLs […]
Wallaroo: A Journey from iOS to macOS (Part 1)
March 22, 2023
Last September we released a completely new app that makes getting wallpapers on your devices a breeze. Wallaroo was written entirely in SwiftUI. We learned a lot writing it and Sean Heber spent five days covering the highlights. But this initial release was only available on iOS. From the get go, we had planned on […]
Announcing Wallaroo for macOS
March 21, 2023
Ever since we launched Wallaroo for iOS back in September of 2022, people have been rediscovering the joy of custom wallpapers. Wallaroo makes it easy to explore, discover, and set the hundreds of wallpapers our artists have created over the past few years, with new creations added each week. Now Wallaroo brings everything you love […]
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 […]
