Launch Pad

Why Steve Jobs would have Loved Design Sprints

Steve Jobs, arguably the best technological innovator of the last 50 years, would have loved design sprints. He would have loved them not for their structure or process details but because they are a tool that allows teams to do what is most important when trying to innovate: Focus. How do design sprints help you focus? By validating and invalidating product ideas quickly. The Real Value of Sprints You see, that’s the real value of design sprints. Contrary to popular belief, the goal of design

swift

iOS Universal Apps: Why and How

At Rocket we've developed many apps that need to support iPhone and iPad. Xcode provides built-in support for configuring universal apps, meaning that a single binary can adapt to, and be optimized for, both device types. But as is with any design pattern, making your app universal has its pros and cons. The Benefits * There is a single codebase. Code can be reused for the functionality that overlaps the iPhone and iPad versions of the app. A bug fixed in one app is a bug fixed in both.

swift

How to Create a Navigation Transition Like the Apple News App

We at Rocket recently developed a new app for Barstool Sports which allows their users to consume its blog posts, podcasts, and videos. For this app, we decided to try to improve upon the default push/pop navigation animation by implementing a custom Apple News-like transition between the story feeds and story detail pages. Apple News Transition Here is the zoom transition that Apple uses within their News app: Default Push/Pop Transition And here's an example of the default push/pop animatio

apple

Initial thoughts on 3D Touch

Just last week Apple released their new iPhones [http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/] (6S and 6S Plus) and made bold statements around how great the new features were, claiming the addition of 3D Touch and a better camera make it worth upgrading. Better cameras are welcome, of course, but what about the 3D Touch feature? The press was gushing [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-apple-built-3d-touch-iphone-6s/] about it. But as designers and developers we were skeptical...could 3D touch real

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