iOS App

As the first technical hire for this app development start up I did it all. This inculded designing the system architecture from the ground up, programming and laying out all the support systems required to get the company on a sound technical footing. App Link

Three Products in One

The challenge designing architecture for this project is that it touches three different product areas: Chat, Social Networking, and Gaming. Each of these features lends itself to different data and web service architectures. Chat implies a store and forward process, Social networking implies offline data, and Gaming requires single repository transactions. The challenge was to build a design allowing the user to continue to use the app, even when offline, while still maintaining transactional data integrity for gaming.

Chats

Social Networking

Game

Data Handling and Threading

Data was stored locally and on a server with the server maintaining the master copy. To keep the app responsive all server communications take place in a background thread with handlers robust enough to respond to all types of data failures.

Data Handling Between Server and Device

Communications and Speed

To greatly augment the speed of the app, a technique of 'display local then update' was employed. When a scene needs data, it first displays local data while starting a background thread to get updated data from the server. When the server data returns it goes back and updates the display. This way the user has a much more responsive, better feeling app.

Versions, More Versions, and Tons of Changes

As the project evolved, the app design was continually refined causing the functionality to change on a daily basis. This created fun programming and maintenance challenges. The code had to be written with enough structure and modularity that changes would have minimal impact on development time. In addition to numerious small changes, the product went through three major design revisions, making this project the equivalent of three product development efforts in one.

Original Design

Revision

Released

Company IT

Although I was hired to build the app, my role expanded to managing all technical aspects of the company. These duties gave me a chance to setup and administer many tools used in software development.