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Enhanced Sectioned Grid with Varying Columns

We’ve been pleased to see that the Sectioned Grid adapter we open-sourced last year has been useful for other Android developers. It’s a modular component that fulfills a commonly encountered desire for nicely formatted grids of data, which seem to be increasingly in demand as Android tablets become more popular. One suggestion made at our GitHub project was to keep grid items at a fixed size. The original implementation let you specify the number of columns, and then automatically resized your grid items based on...

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Harlem Shake for iOS

You thought it was over didn’t you? You thought that surely this meme was done by now. Well it’s not. Introducing Harlem Shake for iOS. Here’s another example using MusicID: It’s super easy to use. Just give it a view to do the initial ‘dance’ like so: Then when you want craziness to ensue: Please don’t ship this. And before you say anything, we know this is incredibly dumb. We promise we’ll release some real open source soon enough. Enjoy!

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A Sectioned Grid for Android

Tablets give you a lot of real estate to play around with. Google has created several features specifically to help developers take advantage of the extra screen space, most obviously the Fragment system. However, one of the most widely-used Android components, the ListView, has not been optimized for the wider screens you encounter on a tablet. Here at Velos, we’ve often found that presenting information in a grid format can look really sharp on tablet devices. You can present many grid items in a single...

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iOS 6 for developers

Apple released iOS 6 to the public last week, just before the iPhone 5 went on sale. There are a lot of new APIs available to make apps better. Here are a few of the ones we’re most excited about. UICollectionView Older versions of iOS didn’t have a built-in control for displaying grid views, similar to the ones in Pinterest or iBooks. Anyone implementing a more complex UI (like Cover Flow) had to either hope a good open-source version existed or start from scratch. Collection...

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Wireframing with OmniGraffle Pro

Wireframing is an important part of the development process. If it isn’t something your team does, it should be. Like blueprints for builders, wireframes give your team enough information to understand the product, estimate cost and architect foundations. This kind of information is invaluable in delivering a solid, well designed product on time and within a budget. There are several approaches to doing wireframing and many tools that can help you wireframe. At Velos, we use Omnigraffle Pro, combined with our custom stencil composed of...

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Say Farewell to Pixels

I often feel jealous of my iOS colleagues. How nice it must be, I think, to have a mere two set of screen resolutions to design for (four if we’re counting retina displays). How nice to have only two aspect ratios to worry about. It must be pleasant to always know exactly how tall the status bar is, and how much space to reserve for the navigation bar.  We Android developers are used to living in a messier world, with far greater variation among our...

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iOS Development Best Practices

There are a lot of ways to successfully develop an iOS application from the ground up. Working in a team can be difficult, especially if everyone has a different idea of how to accomplish the tasks at hand. Here are some general best practices for developing an iOS app. Register for GitHub. Using version control of some kind is not optional. I suggest using GIT with GitHub as it adds several tools to help with collaboration such as a news feed of activity, wiki and...

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Fragging Fragments

Android has been enthusiastically pushing fragments ever since they were added in Honeycomb. They were primarily created to improve code re-use across handset and tablet UIs; in the most common case, tablets will load fragments into two panes on one screen, while handsets will load one fragment per screen. However, fragments also get used in other cases. They’re the preferred replacement for the old Tab, and play a key role in the very useful ViewPager support class. This is great when it works, but makes...

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Coffee on the block: FOURBARREL

While looking for office space in SF we were very attracted to the Mission district: food, bars, music, parks, people, and coffee. I thought our vicinity to the 16th Mission BART station was going to be my prize but after finding our space I was so excited to find ourselves a couple doors down from Fourbarrel coffee. Not only are they roasting great coffee on site and preparing it correctly, they also worked with the City to permanently occupy a few parking spaces to provide...

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New Office!

We moved into a new office! It’s in the wonderful Mission District here in San Francisco. Just a stones throw from Four Barrel Coffee and many other great places.   To celebrate our new offices, we had a few people over and called it an office warming. There was laughing, there was crying. There was also RockBand. See some shots below.