News & Views

• Development
• Bugs
• QA
• Quality

Why Software Fixes Can Create New Bugs and How We Deal With Them

Bugs exist in many different forms, even outside of software. Consider a structural engineer tasked with building a bridge. Calculations need to be made early on, before construction of the bridge begins, to determine what the weight limits of the bridge will be and to ensure it will not become a victim to aeroelastic flutter. Failure to identify these issues early on can (and will) result in a “buggy” bridge that is prone to collapse. A structural engineer building a bridge will begin with blueprints that allow him/her to assess any potential problems early on. It’s obviously much easier to tweak a drawing than a bridge that is already built.

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• Android
• Web
• iOS
• Development

Two Approaches to Building Apps on Multiple Platforms: A Developer's Perspective

Here are several important things to consider before building a product across multiple platforms.

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• Development
• Coding

Legacy Code: 7 tips for approaching code you didn’t write

I was recently presented the opportunity to jump on a project that has been running for 6 years and is easily a thousand files strong. Much of my past engineering experience has been centered on smaller projects that I either created or had direct access to the person who did. Thus, I was a fish out of water inheriting a project of this magnitude. I am writing this post to pass down some words of advice so that your transition will be both productive and as painless as possible.

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• Hack Days

Simplifying Automatic Code Generation with XcodeAutoBasher

Software developers can benefit a lot from automatic code generation tools. They take tedious, repetitive processes out of the workflow, and help eliminate potential mistakes caused by sloppy development (or in the case of iOS, poor spelling in stringly-typed code).

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• SEO

SEO Spring Cleaning: 5 Things Brands Can Do Right Now To Use Google’s Mobilegeddon To Their Advantage

The search algorithm is shifting toward mobile, but businesses still have a chance to catch up and cash in if they move fast. As seen on EContentMag.com

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• Email
• Responsive
• Development

The Guide to Successful Responsive Email Development

Jarrett Widman, Senior Web Engineer at Vokal, outlines the most important considerations for responsive email development.

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• iPad
• iPhone
• Labs

Memory Optimizations in iOS

In a recent client iPad app we learned ways to significantly reduce memory usage and improve speed by converting views to images and reusing frequently used view controllers.

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• News

Mrs MobileMakers Home for Wayward Teen Developers

Last Wednesday, a precocious group of over thirty teens visited the offices of VOKAL Interactive and the MobileMakers studio. These budding developers were not wasting away their salad days loitering at a mall or slumped lifelessly in front of a large flat screen TV. No, these youths were a cohort from the Lake Forest College chapter of iD Programming Academy, a two-week intensive summer camp designed to engage young whippersnappers in the art of coding and the app economy.

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• News
• Development

Lunch & Learn: Time Divisible

Once or twice a month, Vokal hosts an internal Lunch & Learn where any member of the team can take the opportunity to inform their peers on a specific practice, technique, tool, experience, event, ...anything really!

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• Hack Days

Hackdays: GotClocked

Twice a year, Vokal sets aside two “Hack Days” for our team members to help bring their individual ideas to life and pursue new solutions to challenges they identified. Fresh off the heels of our first event, we invited Josh Wu to share his experience.

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