Last year, I worked with Skyd to bring them into the mobile space. This culminated with the release of the Skyd Magazine iOS app. The app has been downloaded by ultimate players in over 11 countries including the US, Canada, Germany, Colombia, and India. It’s exciting to see the digital ultimate community expanding all over the world and I think we should keep moving in this direction.
Just last month, I published my latest project to the App Store, Stack. After a few months of on and off work, I’ve come to a point where I feel I have something worth showing. Stack is an app the brings together a multitude of ultimate resources including Skyd, Ultiworld, AUDL, MLU, and others. Stack offers bookmarking articles to read offline and for quick access and notifications for when new articles are posted.
There are still things that need fixing and a big backlog of improvements for the future. Hopefully that backlog stays replenished with new and interesting ideas. I expect to push out an update at least every month, similar to other major apps.
To all of the non-iPhone users out there, I’d be happy to collaborate with any Android developers to construct an Android version of Stack. Personally, I haven’t touched Android code in years and don’t have time to do it all myself. To the three people who have Windows Phone devices (that’s a joke folks), now’s your time to jump ship or help me find a developer to collaborate with.
My goal with Stack is to increase the reach of digital content providers of all sizes. Over the last 10 years, coverage of our sport has gone from a few threads on outdated forums to power rankings, predictions, and recaps of nearly every tournament in the US. Stack gives the community quick, easy, and timely access to all this new content. It also features the ability to easily add new content providers, so please be vocal about anyone you think should be included. More cooperation between content providers and developers like myself leads to more cool features like notifications and searchable articles.
In addition to being released on the App Store, the project is also available open source on GitHub. This means that the full source code is public and anyone can view, comment, and contribute. Every app on your phones uses some sort of open source software: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and even Apple’s stock apps. Stack uses some pretty cool open source frameworks including Facebook’s AsyncDisplayKit (which helps provide the buttery smooth scrolling performance) and Pinterest’s PINRemoteImage (efficiently downloading and storing all the images). During my time developing Stack, I even had the opportunity to contribute back to the previously mentioned frameworks, fixing a few bugs and improving some features.
The ultimate community as a whole has a sizable number of engineers and developers so we shouldn’t be settling for sub par software, web or mobile (yes I’m looking at you, unnamed national organization). I think collectively we can come together to build some great products that benefit everyone.
Brad Smith
iOS Engineer @Raizlabs Boston, MA
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