What’s happening at Vokal.

    • iOS
    • Development
    • Coding
    • iPhone
    • iPad

    Swift: Open to Everyone

    August 14, 2016

    I’m a junior iOS Engineer at Vokal with only one year of software engineering under my belt, but even without a lot of experience, I was able to contribute to Swift 3 because of the incredibly helpful iOS community. If you are having trouble getting started on contributing, all you have to do is ask for help. The hardest part about contributing to Swift was not actually implementing the task, it was getting started.

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    • News

    Vokal Plays Games For Kids

    August 01, 2016

    On Saturday, November 5th, 2016, Vokal will be hosting Extra Life, a 24 hour gaming charity marathon. All funds raised by the Vokal team leading up to the event, as well as any funds raised during the event go directly to the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago

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    • News

    Finding Our New Home

    July 09, 2016

    We are delighted to report that we have fully moved into our new home at 350 N Orleans (or as Chicagoans call it "The Sun-Times Building")! With great views from the 13th floor to the west and north combining with brand new adjustable height furniture, we're feeling right at home in our new space.

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    • Development
    • iOS
    • iPhone
    • iPad

    WWDC Keynote Recap

    June 18, 2016

    Last week was the annual Apple WWDC keynote address, and it was a big week for us all! We learned about upcoming releases for all four major platforms: watchOS, tvOS, macOS, and iOS. As with every WWDC keynote, there are a number of important announcements - check out our recap and opinions on the top points for each platform.

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    • Android
    • Analytics
    • Development
    • Mobile Apps
    • UX/UI

    Google I/O 2016 Wrap Up

    May 24, 2016

    Google’s 9th I/O developer conference has officially wrapped up and we here at Vokal have compiled our impressions of the various announcements and sessions. Be sure to check back in to Vokal Labs for our Apple WWDC coverage.

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    • Development
    • iOS
    • iPhone
    • iPad

    WWDC Wish List

    May 23, 2016

    The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just a few weeks away. It's an exciting time for all of us who build apps for Apple products—and for a lot of their customers, too—since the week-long conference starts with a keynote address where they typically announce the next versions and updates to OS X and iOS. Every WWDC is preceded by months of rumors and speculation about what those announcements will be (the all electric AppleCar!), since Apple keeps their cards close to their chest. Here's a list of the things that we're hoping to see on June 13th.

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    • Development
    • Web
    • Analytics
    • Data
    • Insights

    Introducing the Vokal Vision KPI Dashboard

    May 20, 2016

    Managing a business, platform, or product in a complex and rapidly changing environment is challenging to say the least. For those of us in the digital space, it is the norm. Often, it is difficult to gain true situational awareness and know whether your activities are moving you in the right direction. Yes, we have analytics for various pieces of the puzzle, but what we really need is full data integration and a clear, simplified view of what matters most.

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    • Android
    • Design
    • Development

    Streamlined Asset Export for Android

    April 21, 2016

    As an Android developer, I have long been envious of XCode's ability to automatically generate rasterized images from a PDF. While there have been several attempts at replicating this behavior on Android with SVG images and the custom Android vector format, we at Vokal felt like something was still missing.

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    • Development
    • QA

    Opening Up Engineering at Vokal

    March 17, 2016

    6 years ago I committed the first draft of our coding style guidelines for Objective-C and Java. At the time Vokal was a mere 7 people and our client work was exclusively focused on delivering mobile applications for iOS and Android. Today our company is 10 times larger and our service offering has grown to match, capable of producing large-scale multi-platform digital experiences. The original code style repositories still exist today, but have grown and evolved to include much more - helping to define our engineering team's structure, process, and culture. We are now proud to share this documentation publicly at engineering.vokal.io.

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    • Web
    • Development

    Web Team Year in Review

    February 25, 2016

    2015 was a big year for web development at Vokal. We took a lot of steps to create more modular components, and to support more technologies. These steps improved our quality while also increasing our velocity.

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