The Breakroom
Category: Development
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 […]
Masto-do or Masto-don’t?
January 27, 2023
Let’s just say that January 12th was expected, yet still surprising. We knew the cutting and slashing at Twitter would affect us at some point, but how we’d get eviscerated was an unknown. Many other people saw it was coming as reality began to sink in at the end of October. We’ve been asked, countless […]
Announcing Linea Sketch 4.2
January 24, 2023
Today’s Linea update brings several new and exciting features designed to give you more options while sketching and when moving images into and out of the app. Version 4.2 also includes a bevy of improvements that reduce friction when transforming artwork, provide new and updated templates, and much more. The Nitty Gritty Linea’s new Organic […]
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 […]
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 […]
