A team of Developers, Designers and Geeks. All about hacking and building things.
In this tutorial, we’re using Skygear, our company’s open source backend-as-a-service (BaaS), to help developers build a cloud photo upload platform. Skygear includes essential features such as push notifications, cloud database, and user authentication.
Continue reading “How to upload photos to the cloud with Swift3 and a serverless platform”
What do you do if you have a site you want to update once in a while? It’s not a blog, so you don’t want WordPress. It’s also not worth building a customized backend. In developer-speak, we would think about a remote data hosting to store the data for semi-dynamic websites or applications.
So we made a free open source tool APITable for that, which converts tables to JSON API.
Continue reading “A spreadsheet-based API for building MVPs.”
You’ve been working hard preparing for your launch to AppStore. The final step is getting it submitted to iTunesConnect.
You have to fill in the app details, upload the app icon, localized descriptions and preview images— upload them one-by-one going through your list of localizations for each supported device in English; one-by-one for each device in French; one-by-one for each device in German, etc, etc.
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OK, 13 languages.
You have to upload screenshots one-by-one for each device, for each locale. Oh that’s O(n²)
Let’s say you have built an awesome app for iPhone & iPad and now it’s ready for launch.
Question, how many preview images exactly do you have to add?
The answer is simple. For each locale, there are 3.5-inch, 4-inch, 4.7-inch, 5.5-inch and iPad screenshots (and don’t forget the upcoming iPad Pro). There are 5 images in each set, that gives you 5 x 5 = 25 pcs for each locale.
Needless to say, you will have to organize 25 x 13 = 325 preview images to iTunesConnect. Sounds scary right?
In WWDC2015, Apple announced iOS 9 for iPhone and watchOS 2 for iWatch. It has been a huge revamp for watchOS. Not until now, a watch app finally runs natively on the watch.
That means the code is now executing on your watch instead of the phone. By reducing multiple times of data transfer between devices, this is going to make the app loads a lot quicker and responds in a shorter period of waiting time.
Continue reading “Spentable (Expense Tracker): How we built our first app for watchOS 2”
Open Graph is a good standard, it helps turning a web page to become a rich object in a social graph.
If you follow the Open Graph protocol, most of the social platforms (Facebook, Reddit, etc. ) will crawl your website and present it in a nice and structured format.
Continue reading “Basic Open Graph techniques that optimize shared links on Facebook”
We geeks often have our own ways to express, which might be too geeky for normal people to understand.
Here are some general guides to help you communicating with your geek friends (at least knowing what they are thinking about… )
Spoken by Computer Scientists to say that X is a kind of Y, but Y is not X.
Real life examples:
“Matcha is a subset of Green Tea. They are different!”
Over the years, we’ve been building loads of nicely-crafted iOS applications for our clients.
To keep everyone work closely, we send daily builds to our QA Team, beta users, clients, other team members. However, building an iOS is still painful for Project Manager — It involves compiling, uploading the app to TestFlight or HockeyApp,
setting up Crittercism for collecting crash reports (Those who have experience, should know that you have to upload dSym files for symbolic debug messages), notify everyone on Slack, etc.
Much better if we can automate all these with each Pull Request.
Continue reading “Continuously Delivering iOS Beta Builds Automated with Travis CI”