Animating the Skeleton

Wiring up a 12ft Home Depot skeleton with servos, Arduino, and an iOS app — using ARKit to puppet a giant skeleton in real time from your phone.

Custom View Controller Transitions in Landscape

iOS 7’s custom transitions are great — until you rotate the device. A breakdown of the landscape bugs, the hacky workarounds that don’t quite hold up, and why we went back to view controller containment.

Compares

Announcing Compares, our side-by-side photo sharing app. Built from scratch with a custom backend, onion-skinning camera, and a social layer for sharing before-and-after shots.

How To Support Old iOS SDK’s in Xcode 5

Xcode 5 dropped the iOS 6 SDK, but you can just copy it back in. Here’s where the SDKs live and how to grab them if you already nuked your old Xcode.

SMSquashView

Bringing cartoon-style squash and stretch to iOS views, automatically. The layer tracks its own velocity and distorts along the direction of travel — no configuration needed, volume stays constant.

Spatter and Spark

Shipping a kids’ storybook app with rich animation and a custom framework under the hood. Built on top of our Goodnight Safari codebase, with artist-driven XML animation specs and a parent-facing progress dashboard.

SMPageControl, Meet UIAccessibility

Adding VoiceOver support to our UIPageControl replacement — and naming pages too. With per-page names and full accessibility parity, SMPageControl finally earns its 1.0 and lands on CocoaPods.

Mistakes Were Made: Audio and ARC

ARC silently kills your AVAudioPlayer mid-playback. Here’s why and how to fix it. Spoiler: make it an ivar, and maybe file a radar while you’re at it.

SMPageControl: UIPageControl’s Fancy One-Upping Cousin

A drop-in UIPageControl replacement with custom dots, images, and per-page indicators. Swap class names, tweak diameters and margins, or go full Dribbble with per-page custom indicator images.

Premature Completion: An Embarrassing Problem

Core Animation runs your completion block early if it doesn’t find any animations. Rude. Includes a sample project to poke at the behavior yourself and avoid hours of confused debugging.

SMShadowedLayer

A CALayer subclass that fakes realistic lighting and shadows during Core Animation. Uses Lambert illumination math and a custom animatable property to keep shading correct mid-transform, specular highlights included.

Sim Deploy

A drag-and-drop tool for getting simulator builds to non-developers. It even supports a custom URL scheme so distributing a new build is as simple as sending someone a link.

Cancel dispatch_after

A simple wrapper to cancel delayed blocks, because GCD won’t let you. Includes the open-source code on GitHub and a look under the hood at the block-juggling trick that makes it work.

Mistakes Were Made: Integral Bounds

Non-integral CALayer bounds don’t just look blurry — they actually chop off pixels. A forensic look at CATextLayer backing stores, with screenshots and sample code to prove it.

All in the Timing: Keeping Track of Time Passed on iOS

Why your freemium game’s clock is so easy to cheat, and what you can (maybe) do about it. A deep dive into absolute vs. relative time on iOS, and a hybrid server-based approach to keep cheaters honest.

A Decade of WWDC

From the first keynote in 2009 to watching from a Southwest flight in 2019. A decade of WWDC, told through tweets.

WWDC and PegJump

Spotting your own app icon in the Apple Store window, heading into the WWDC keynote, and the eternal struggle with App Store reviews.

The Mellmo Days

Beer floats, Guinness ice cream, custom Adidas, a barista after launch, and CAKE at the WWDC beer bash. Startup life at Mellmo was something else.