News & Views

  • The Importance of Early User Testing

    March 13, 2014

    Since we subscribe to agile development principles here at Vokal Interactive, one maxim we try to impress upon our clients is to "ship early, and ship often." Sometimes its not always easy to get clients on board with this approach; it's easy to get into a trap of thinking that your app has to have every cool feature you thought of before or since development began, and that every feature has to be "perfect." However, such thinking can lead to roadblocks and delays, pushing an app's release date further and further away while competitors are busy building a user base.

    Read More

  • Fun with Work Downtime: Cat2Cat

    January 21, 2014

    My employers at Vokal Interactive have been kind enough to let me use my downtime to tackle of one of my biggest irritations with the new Asset Catalogs in Xcode 5: The fact that you still have to use the fragile imageNamed: system to call images in code.

    Read More

  • Lunch & Learn: Game Experience/Engagement & HCI

    December 06, 2013

    For this week's Lunch & Learn, Interaction Designer at VOKAL, Brian Flavin, applied his user experience know-how to the world of game experience and engagement. Brian kicked off with a high level definition of HCI and its relation to game engagement. Applying the objective of Traditional Human Computer Interaction, which is focused on the facilitation of user-defined tasks, and comparing this to the objectives of game engagement, which is based on value systems attributed to the player (or as Brian revealed, his value of launching arrows at the heads of his enemies), he concluded that game design is rather, evaluated from an HCI perspective, by measuring the value a player gains from participation in a game. i.e. The Value Systems Theory.

    Read More

  • The Wireless Pizzas: In a League of Their Own

    July 24, 2013

    Hey Sportsfans!

    Guess who's got a Softball team? That's right the bros and gals of VOKAL. Jealous? You should be. Going by the epic team title of Wireless Pizza, this team is league quality all the way down to the official t-shirt. All we need now is a big fuzzy mascot. Check out some highlights from the top of the summer season...

    Read More

  • Jarrett T.K.O.'s Lunch & Learn: Intro to Knockout

    May 03, 2013

    For May's Lunch & Learn, Web Engineer at VOKAL, Jarrett Widman, dropped some knowledge on using Knockout and the MVVM pattern . He introduced the concepts of two-way databinding, how MVVM is different than MVC, and showed a number of simple examples to demonstrate the features and usage of Knockout.

    Read More

  • NSCoder Meet-Up Last Night

    May 01, 2013

    For the last couple months, Sean Wolter of VOKAL has been hosting the NSCoder Chicago meet-ups at the VOKAL offices and Mobile Makers campus.  On the last Tuesday of every month, fellow Chicago developers get together to enjoy libations, pizza pie and great conversation. It's an opportunity to share projects, advice and maybe do little coding to boot!

    Read More

  • Some Mobile Web Considerations for Native App Designers

    April 05, 2013

    As web apps increase in popularity in the mobile space, designs traditionally built for native iOS or Android apps have started to find their way into the hands of web developers.  Web development and native app development can pose some very different challenges.  If you've designed a lot of native apps, knowledge of the process a web developer goes through can really help your designs hit the ground running.

    Read More

  • This Month's Lunch & Learn: Making Comics?

    April 03, 2013

    Everyone has a pet project that may either devour many an evening here, a weekend there, or perhaps has become a full-time commitment. Max Bare from the VOKAL design team falls into the semi-committed category. For this month's Lunch & Learn, Max shared with the VOKAL fleet, his topic: Hope to Create Comics. Referencing his personal project Mystery Afoot.

    Read More

  • Vokal Wall Draw Continues...

    March 29, 2013

    We tend to immerse ourselves in many of our projects here at VOKAL and the offices themselves are certainly no exception. In the continuance of this effort, the VOKAL design team has been taking a periodic evening or weekend to work on an ever expanding mural. Last night, VOKAL designers Joe Call and Max Bare along with Andrew Thompson (VOKAL friend and member of OhNo!Doom) took a couple hours to continue the doodling.

    Read More

  • Mixer for The Mobile Makers Academy End of Semester

    December 18, 2012

    Last week The Mobile Makers Academy celebrated the End of their Fall 2012 Semester with what else but a night filled with pizza, libations and good times. The mixer was hosted at VOKAL's shiny new 4th floor expanded offices.

    Read More