Articles about Touchgram
Articles we published about Touchgram, the stories behind the product, the technology and related issues such as data privacy.
2021
- Touchgram vs the iMessage Corner of Doom
Thanks to a new tester, found a gotcha in our Sense Touch editor design that makes it look like Touchgram just crashed.
2020
- Apple Privacy - What iMessage Extensions know about you
Explains how Apple safeguard your privacy by running iMessage extensions like Touchgram in a state of ignorance. We know nothing, not even your name. - Touchgram Origins — Personal
The family history and backstory inspiring Touchgram, including how my parents returned to England from Australia & made me aware of what it's like having young children with remote grandparents. - Touchgram Origins — Technical
The dual obsession with touch-driven interfaces and user-empowering tools such as Hypercard which inspire and set goals for Touchgram. - Birthday Card via Canva + Touchgram
A walkthrough of starting with a Canva birthday card template, customising that card and making a two-page Touchgram. It shows that the way v1.0 handled background pictures did a lousy job with landscape content because all pictures were stretched, so that was fixed in v1.1.
A walkthrough of starting with a Canva birthday card template, customising that card and making a two-page Touchgram. It shows that the way v1.0 handled background pictures did a lousy job with landscape content because all pictures were stretched, so that was fixed in v1.1. - Redesigning Touchgram for Dark Mode
A story for designers and developers about the challenges of how Dark Mode on phones requires you to rethink your app color scheme. It includes some technical discussions and a spreadsheet where the color values were worked out. Because most of your interaction within Touchgram is within the Messages app, we had to support dark mode for iOS 13. - The Foot Mom
The quirky true story behind the foot tickling example that's been part of Touchgram since the very beginning. - Testing iOS 14
A little piece confirming that all is well - the current v1.2.5 on the App Store works just fine on the iOS 14 beta.
Open source from Touchgram
For developers, and a bit for designers too. As Touchgram is developed, little explorations are written to see how different programming technologies work. Where possible, these are publicly released.
2020
- animashing
Animation techniques used in the Touchgram user interface. Mostly shows off use of Supernova Studio to generate code from animation visual design. - DDD19 Tech Talk on animation
My presentation, videos and accompanying source for a short talk on animation in user interfaces and the tools used in the animashing tests above.. - im-plausibilities
Many small samples of programming Apple's iMessage app extensions. - perswifting
An alternative method for building up persistence of rich object frameworks. It works around a major weakness of Apple's Codable for polymorphic types. - SpriteKittenly
Explorations of using SpriteKit, Apple's 2D games programming engine which is used in Touchgram.