Marc Palmer
I'm a product-focused engineer specialising in iOS, tvOS & watchOS apps
This was last updated on Tuesday 21 March, 2023.
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Overview
I am a senior contract developer, product designer and consultant with over 34 years experience. Based in the UK I work remotely for clients worldwide. I love simple functional design. I can build entire iOS, tvOS or watchOS apps to a high standard. Most often I work on existing code and consult on product design & user experience as part of your team.
Since 2018 I have worked as a senior contract engineer with the very small team at TopHatch on the popular sketching and design app Concepts. With a very large user base it is consistently in the Top 10 Grossing iPad apps in Graphics & Design in U.S., China and other territories it has been featured numerous times by Apple in promotional events, App Store and on-devices in Apple Stores.
In 2022 I finally released my side-project video subtitling app Captionista which received excellent reviews from MacStories, Stuff and techradar. I also created a Swift framework nobody uses called Flint.
I have more than 10 years’ commercial experience in iOS development with both Objective-C and Swift as an indie and in startups of various sizes. I am so passionate about native iOS as a platform that I reset my entire client base several years ago to make great native apps instead of the web apps and Open Source projects I’d been building.
If you need somebody on your team to advocate for a triple-A user experience on Apple platforms, that’s me. I can also help if you need just a few hours of consulting advice on your iOS app’s direction. I love to help businesses and other developers.
Through my career to date I have helped more than 39 clients on at least 57 commercial projects including 13 iOS or Mac Apps. I have a good technical understanding of several programming languages, various mobile app technologies, web stack technologies, API design, writing developer and consumer documentation, and have been the CTO on many small projects.
I was fortunate enough to have an early start in technology in the 1980s and have now been a programmer for 39 years. I grew up doing low-level programming on the BBC B Micro and Atari ST. As a teenager I would optimise 68000 assembly sprite routines, bit scrollers, scrappers and so on using Motorola’s instruction cycle timing charts.
My experience runs the gamut of many diverse products from iOS fitness, music and photo apps as well as cloud storage client apps, through to hospital ICU monitoring systems and mobile 3G fax machines with TCP/IP (full email and web-browsing — I kid you not!), even old school mobile phone games and FMCG brand websites.
I host WWDC and Apple product keynote meetups for the local developer community and Apple faithful here in the Cotswolds at the lovely co-working space here in Stroud that I co-own.
Contact me to talk about the great iOS, tvOS or watchOS project you are building.
Mail me at marc@anyware.co.uk, follow me on Twitter or Mastodon, see some examples of my code at Github or read my blog marcpalmer.net
Client apps
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Concepts |
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AugmentedBerlin |
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Upthere HomeUpthere Home, cloud storage (now defunct)
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Kowalah
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Upthere CameraUpthere Camera, a cloud backed camera app
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enquos Total Health |
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wāv
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BBC Earth PrototypeImmersive and interactive content viewer
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Video player prototypeStreaming linear TV video player for a satellite channel
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My Apps
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CaptionistaQuickly add subtitles to social media videos
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Hobson |
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BloopStill a work in in progress
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SoundproofAn iPhone music player for practice (now defunct)
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Skills summary
Shipping: I have designed and built iOS apps from wireframes through to App Store release. In the distant past I built many public-facing web applications for brands like Tropicana, Tropicana Go!, PJ Smoothies, Copella Fruit Juices, and Cobra Beer. I shipped eight J2ME mobile phone games, QA’d and built from a single code base across roughly 50 different handsets with a custom build system. I spent several years releasing and maintaining many Open Source Grails plugins.
Writing: I have written huge amounts of customer and developer targeted documentation for numerous products, including Flint framework, documentation for large Grails plugins and a short e-book. I have authored numerous REST API specifications. I have also blogged on technical matters semi-regularly since the early 2000s. Recent technical blog posts on iOS topics include a guide “Turning UI Specifications into Swift code” and a piece on debugging a mystery crash at startup.
Supporting: I have been the customer support contact for all my own Open Source and commercial products. I am mindful of the frustration people feel when things go wrong, and want to make sure my products meet their expectations. The reasonable ones, that is.
Speaking: I have presented technical talks related to Grails at several conferences including four years of “Grails Exchange” in London. I am pretty good at explaining things, although there’s always room for improvement. I have also made several high quality screencasts in the past, both public and privately for clients.
Languages: I learned roughly in this order… Basic (ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro) → 6502 assembly → Motorola 68000 assembly → C → Pascal → Object Pascal → C++ → Delphi → Java → PHP → JavaScript → Groovy → Objective-C → Swift. HTML & CSS of course, though extremely rusty.
Platforms: iOS, tvOS, watchOS, macOS. In the past; Grails web apps, Spring Framework, Java 2 ME (mobile phones), Java 2 CDC (wireless gateways), OSGi, PalmOS, Windows 16 & 32-bit, ATARI ST (TOS).
Open Source: I developed the open source Flint framework for Apple platforms. I spent seven years as a very active member in the Grails development community and being one of the most prolific Grails plugin developers, maintaining and supporting a dozen or so open source plugins, and contributing to the Grails framework itself. I am particularly pleased with my work on the design and implementation of the Grails enhanced stack trace output which was absorbed into the Groovy language.
Personal background
I am 50 years old and married with two daughters. I discovered relatively late in life that I really love design and have a high level of attention to detail I can bring to bear. I only switched to Mac in 2006. Shhh… don’t tell anyone.
I’ve been vegetarian for roughly 29 years and “amazingly” remain alive to this day. I play drums and electric guitar to a not particularly high standard and love all music – especially metal — as well as cooking, photography and gardening. I am virtually impossible to offend, and have a pretty dark sense of humour.
Availability
Luckily for me, I’m currently busy contracting at TopHatch Inc. on Concepts, but I might be available later in 2023. For more details please get in touch by mailing marc@anyware.co.uk.
As part of my App business Montana Floss Co. I can also offer boutique iOS app design & build services, where I work with designers I trust to create great apps from the ground up.
⚠️ Before contacting me: please note that I am not interested in working on military or defence projects, for companies that perform testing on animals, gambling related products, or projects that are based on profit from environmental damage, fossil fuel extraction or any other stuff that I consider to be damaging the world — if in doubt, please ask.
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