The Breakroom
Category: Development
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 […]
Frenzic: Overtime – The Long Wait Is Over
July 7, 2021
Last month’s announcement was a long time coming. Frenzic on macOS was introduced 14 years ago. For players on iOS, it was a mere 13 year wait. Our First Wait The long delay shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise: the development history of Frenzic is full of waiting for the right moment. […]
Making Music for Robots
June 28, 2021
Frenzic: Overtime is the fast-paced sequel to the original game which first debuted thirteen years ago. Everything about this new title has been propelled far beyond the original – including the soundtrack music which is streaming now on Apple Music and Spotify. When I created the original music for Frenzic, I’d been a casual GarageBand […]
Frenzic: Overtime – Coming Soon to Apple Arcade
April 2, 2021
Today we’re pleased to announce that Frenzic: Overtime is coming soon to Apple Arcade. This new game combines fast-paced and engaging play with stunning visuals and sound. It’s an arcade style puzzler that players can easily pick up and enjoy for a few minutes or even hours. We’re thrilled Apple is giving us this opportunity […]
Tot – A New Kind of Accessibility
May 5, 2020
Today we’re happy to announce the release of Tot 1.0.5 for both iOS and macOS. If your eyes work well, there’s not a lot to get excited about. But folks with vision difficulties will have a wholly different outlook. The initial releases of Tot didn’t have great accessibility. We knew it needed improving, but experience […]
