News & Views

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Ping Pong Tourney and Other Feats of Strength

    November 09, 2012

    Last night was the first (of hopefully many) Building-Wide Ping Pong Tourney, this time hosted at VOKAL offices.  Drinks were consumed, folks were mingling and competition was of course furious (and sportsmanly). Below are some epic highlights of epicness.

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  • New VOKAL Office Under Way!

    October 12, 2012

    Exciting developments! The expansion of VOKAL Interactive offices is well underway. A day of drywalling going up and overhead lights customized to VOKAL green. Soon we'll have another floor for our ever-expanding ranks of designers and engineers.

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  • Functional and Asynchronous Programming in iOS

    January 05, 2012

    A couple of months ago I started working on a simple project using node.js and I wanted to write a post about the similarities and differences in functional programming between JavaScript and Objective-C. However, while I was writing that post I realized I did not truly understand functional programming. I could write blocks in Objective-C and I could write functions in JavaScript but the theory behind it was lost to me. That being said, I decided to dig deeper to understand not just what the code was accomplishing but why.

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  • Humanoid Wrap-Up

    December 19, 2011

    It's always rewarding when you get to wrap up a project. It is even better when the project you are wrapping up is for Humanoid, and their way of saying thank you is to send over a brand new Humanoid Wakeboard!!

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  • Automated Testing in iOS

    November 30, 2011

    When we send an app out into the world we want to be sure it’s bulletproof. I’m sure you write excellent code and you unit-test like a mad man, but how can you be sure? Wouldn't it be great to plug in a device and have Instruments run an exhaustive UI test while checking for leaks and logging total memory and cpu usage? Yes it would.

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  • Clear and Concise REST APIs

    November 08, 2011

    APIs have users just like apps have users, with the exception that an API’s users are developers. It’s unfortunate how frequently we encounter APIs which are needlessly complex and hard to use. Documentation sometimes is so complicated that it actually makes the API harder to understand rather than easier.

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