What’s happening at Vokal.

    • iOS
    • iPad

    Help Get Customers The Most Bang For Their iPad Buck With iOS 9 Multitasking

    August 22, 2015

    Since the first hardware was rolled 2010, the knock on the iPad has always been that it’s simply an oversized iPhone. While there have been some options which Apple has provided to help developers take advantage of the additional screen real estate like UISplitView, the iPad has lacked the ability to let users take full advantage of that real estate directly...until now. With the announcement of iOS 9, Apple added three new, iPad-only features that are designed to take advantage of the additional space, memory, and horsepower in a device that’s the size of an iPad instead of an iPhone: Picture in Picture, Slide Over, and Split View.

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    • Web
    • Development

    The New vokal.io

    August 13, 2015

    You probably didn’t notice that we migrated our whole website from Drupal to Keystone.JS, but we did, and it was a great experience.

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    • Development
    • Bugs
    • QA
    • Quality

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

    July 04, 2015

    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

    July 01, 2015

    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

    June 19, 2015

    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

    May 27, 2015

    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

    May 15, 2015

    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

    May 07, 2015

    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

    January 20, 2015

    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

    January 20, 2015

    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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