Going deep with Accessibility in Soundproof

December 1, 2014
by Marc
Development / iOS

When we first released Soundproof we had to make the difficult decision to delay polishing our VoiceOver experience for accessibility users.

We had done some work on this already, but due to the nature of our custom UI elements such as the time scrubber and Count-In screen, the work was too much to complete first time around.

In hindsight, I really would like to have done this for the first release. It seems to be common that developers don’t bother with this until later, if at all, but it is extremely useful as it tells you things about your visual UI that you wouldn’t have considered. In short, it is a great test of your visual design.

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Logging in Swift without overhead in production

October 29, 2014
by Marc
Development / iOS

I recently wanted to start covering start writing all my new app code in Swift, but hit a big problem: I use CocoaLumberjack everywhere and its not ready for Swift yet. They are working on this right now for a 2.0 release.

I checked around github and it seems some good work is being done on this. However the missing piece was very important: because Swift lacks conditional defines and a macro preprocessor, all arguments and strings you pass to the log functions would be evaluated every time — even if you had the logging level set to exclude it, or totally disabled.

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The Making of Soundproof, part 3: Unlocking features with In-App Purchases

October 20, 2014
by Marc
Development / iOS / User Experience

This is the third in a series of posts relating to the making of Soundproof for iPhone. See also: part 1, part 2

During the process of making Soundproof, we had to consider what the business model would be. I wrote some early thoughts about pricing and talked about some issues with implementing upgrade pricing with In-App Purchases previously. Here, we’ll take a brief look at the experience of implementing In-App Purchases and the user experience.

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The Making of Soundproof, part 1: iPhone 6 made our huge play button look tiny

October 13, 2014
by Marc
Development / iOS / User Experience

This is the first in a series of posts relating to the making of Soundproof for iPhone. See also: part 2

Some background: the first release of our music practice app Soundproof was “Waiting for Review” in the last week of September when my iPhone 6 arrived. I ran the app on the iPhone 6 and of course got the stretched up iPhone 5 UI. It was OK, but a bit “Duplo” shall we say. Also our very subtle background gradient was being stretched. Nobody else would notice but… there is pride to consider.

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