Published in UX Collective·PinnedMember-onlyWhole lottie tools out thereFrom ugly-GPL-free to inspirational procedural animation, your alternatives to Adobe After Effects. — Lottie is an incredibly successful format for describing vector animation. Vector means shapes moving and changing, as opposed to a video-like animation where you have pixel-by-pixel changes every 1/24th second. Storing shapes and changes is dramatically more efficient in space. Update 2022–02–11 — see LottieLab new tool added at end.Lottie Animation6 min read
Published in Touchgram·PinnedMember-onlyHow Apple broke apps on old phonesBlindsided by Bitcode. Another Apple bug tale, this one almost un-testable, and a bit of a lesson on privacy. — Apple in December 2021 broke apps on phones running iOS earlier than the current version 15. This affected developers all around the world, including Touchgram. Anyone releasing an app update from early December onwards was likely to be vulnerable. The bug was sneaky and impossible to pick up until an…Apple7 min read
Published in Touchgram·PinnedMember-onlyApple’s bug, or mine (Sprite bites)?Programming and debugging life — what a really hard bug looks like being found & fixed. A tale for startup founders, developers and the curious. — This is what despair looks like. This is a tale for programmers or anyone interested in what it’s like for us debugging things. If you’re in a relationship with a developer and wonder why sometimes they can be incredibly wrong about how long things take, this may help you understand.Programming6 min read
Published in Meandyrings·Jul 8Member-onlyBye, CharleyI’m sitting for the last night with our dog, for the gentle needle comes tomorrowPets1 min readCharley ever-present on a messy office floorBye, Charley----
Published in Touchgram·Jun 6Member-onlyOnboarding Touchgram with TouchgramsWhy the next version of Touchgram teaches you how to use it, with a bunch of Touchgrams. — “Why Dogfooding?” There is an old tradition in product development that supposedly dates back to real dogfood manufacturers — if the members of the board couldn’t stand the taste of the dogfood then it wasn’t fit for dogs either. “Yeah but what does that have to do with Touchgram?” Touchgram…Design5 min read
Published in Meandyrings·Mar 24Member-onlyMidnight after Amber(re-read for the umpteenth comforting time) — Poesy words arrive in my whisky’d dog-woken brain, like ant-trails of rain on drought-set clay. Blinkingly real, tears of electric, distant storms. Zelazny wrote, of moth-made, Vorpal sword, lines to end all…Poetry1 min readMidnight after Amber(re-read for the umpteenth comforting time)Poesy words arrivein my whisky’d dog-woken brain,like ant-trails of rainon drought-set clay.Blinkingly real,tears of electric, distant storms.Zelazny wrote,of moth-made, Vorpal sword,lines to end all…----
Published in Touchgram·Mar 15Member-onlyHow Touchgram is Developed — BackwardsThe summary of how Touchgram is developed is simple: Write playable experiences (like a games programmer) Add encoding of supporting data Add a user interface I’m posting this explanation because it’s something that gets referred to often in conversation in person and online. In more detail, it goes like this…Design3 min read
Published in Touchgram·Mar 15Member-onlyTouchgram’s new Core Engine & a long yearA technical and cautionary tale for startups This is mostly about engineering decisions and an overall look at how Touchgram works under the hood. If you’re a startup founder or engineering manager, you may find it schadenfreude-ingly entertaining or instructive. There’s been a long year of work on the core…Design5 min read
Published in Touchgram·Feb 26Member-onlyA Text Tale. My Worst Bug in 40 YearsA debugging tale of blind alleys, despair, and the power of stubbornly just keeping playing with something until you notice a vital clue. — Touchgram got stalled for an embarrassing, almost three full months, in 2020. With one bug. I’ve been a developer for nearly 40 years and seen some horrible code. I’ve even written some of it. As I’ve tweeted recently, I don’t tend to write simple bugs any more. …Debugging6 min read
Published in Bootcamp·Feb 18Member-onlyFacing up to ugly — a text edit UI storyEven an anonymous app can get user feedback, if you ask nicely. — Touchgram is a creative app for making small interactive experiences, currently shipping inside Apple Messages. It’s a very ambitious product for a solo founder, with an internal complexity approaching that of PowerPoint or similar presentation apps on desktop. The initial plan was to get most of the core platform working…Design7 min read