development - Novoda Insights

The ultimate guide to AR Design, ARKit, CoreML and more!

Over the course of a few months, various people at Novoda have experimented with technologies such as Augmented Reality, Machine Learning, Image Recognition and more. We've written a lot about these topics and wanted to gather all our blog posts in one place for your ease!

product & design

Adding the finishing touches to 3D models in Xcode

In this post, we will continue our intro into designing for AR by adding our models into the demo AR app and apply lighting, shadows, and animations! These are the most important things you need to know in order to achieve realism in your AR app.

ar

Designing 3D models for AR apps (ARKit)

The very first steps of creating an AR app is getting your models ready for use. In this post we explain how to create models, animate them, and export them in an appropriate way for your AR app.

mobileconference

XConf Manchester

Back in July, Joe and I travelled across from Novoda's Liverpool office to Manchester for ThoughtWork’s day long conference, XConf. One of the great features of XConf, is that

cross platform

React Native, Flutter, Xamarin: a comparison

In this article we investigate the current state of things for the more popular iOS and Android cross-platform frameworks. Read on to get a definitive answer on what each framework

swift

Safer SWIFT – Moving the security game to the level of programming languages

With software becoming evermore present in our private and professional lives it is probably not surprising that software applications, with all their weaknesses, have also become increasingly interesting to hackers. There exist many different ways to hack applications and crack accounts, e.g. eavesdropping

engineering

A trip to the seaside: iOS Dev UK

This week I had the pleasure of attending iOS Dev UK, in the lovely Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast. Here’s my thoughts on the conference, including a look at

engineering

Take control of your backend with Firebase Cloud Functions

As a software engineer building Android apps, I inevitably run into problems with server API’s not designed with mobile clients in mind. In this post I’ll explain how

engineering

Q&A - Software Craftsmanship Conference London 2017

SCLConf is for software craftspeople for whom delivering software on time simply isn’t enough. Read on for some insights into crafting software at Novoda. This is a cross-post from

engineering

Using Sonar in Swift

At Novoda we find it extremely important to measure the efficiency of a team and the quality of our work. To do so, we need tools that help us demonstrate our capability and competence in developing trustable and powerful software, as well as analyzing

engineering

Android Things & IoT @ Liverpool Makefest

MakeFest Liverpool is a family-friendly event celebrating low level technologies, hardware, hacking and making. We participated again with a stand at the 2017 event and built two fun Internet of

engineering

CodeMobile 2017 - the lowdown

Here’s what I learnt from CodeMobile, Chester’s very own mobile developer conference. Last month I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural CodeMobile conference for mobile developers in

engineering

Custom authentication with Amazon Cognito and Firebase

As developers, we are always trying to move our technology knowledge forward and at Novoda, we are especially interested in BFF (backend for frontend) solutions to have some abilities on

testing & QA

Testing Talkback in isolation with Espresso

You can easily detect if TalkBack is enabled when binding views. You can then change their behaviour to make interaction with elements more natural. This blogpost explains how to test this functionality. The biggest problem with testing custom behaviour with TalkBack is time. You

engineering

I/O '17 - What’s new in Firebase

Great times are coming for Firebase. It was the subject of 25 talks at the recent Google I/O '17 event. So, what's new? This is a quick bullet point