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Cal Stephens
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Motion Engineering at Scale

December 7, 2022

How Airbnb is applying declarative design patterns to rapidly build fluid transition animations

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Announcing Lottie 4.0

December 6, 2022

A new rendering engine with significant performance improvements powered by Core Animation

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Announcing Photo Map 1.2: Over 80 new maps, and more!

October 8, 2019

Photo Map 1.2 is now available to download on the App Store! This is a packed update that includes over 80 new maps, great new features, and a rethought business model based on feedback from the launch back in August.

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The new layout for Photo Map's Map List
 
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Some of the new countries maps available in Photo Map 1.2
 
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Maps for all 50 of the US States are now available in Photo Map 1.2!
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Announcing Photo Map

August 25, 2019

Photo Map is now available to download on the App Store! It’s a brand new app that uses your photos to tell the story of the places you’ve visited. Your trip photos are found automatically and combined together on the map to create a beautiful composite of all the places you’ve been.

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Window Acquired by a Health-Focused Mobile Development Firm

July 18, 2019

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Big news! Earlier this summer, Window was acquired by a large health-and-wellness-focused mobile development firm. They’ll be managing and improving the app going forward, and I won’t be involved in the project anymore.

This transiton came at a great time in my personal life. I devoted a huge portion of 2018 towards creating Window 3.0 (that update was over 8 months in the making!). I’m starting a full time iOS engineering position at Airbnb on July 22, so I would have have much less time available to work on supporting and improving Window. Instead, Window will be in great hands. I’m looking forward to seeing where they take the project!

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Remembering T-Squared

April 23, 2019

I graduate from Georgia Tech next week, so I thought now would be a great time to revist one of the first projects I worked on as a student here.

T-Square

When I started at Tech back in 2015, we used an online learning management system called T-Square. It was the platform we used for all of our courses, and it included things like our assignments, grades, resources, and instructor announcements. T-Square was built in the early-2000s, and it looks the part. The mobile site is a particularly bad offender, with no visual styling to speak of. After dealing with it for my first two weeks of class, I decided I wanted to try and do something about it.

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T-Square's standard desktop web interface.
 
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T-Square's standard mobile web interface.
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Recap: TreeHacks 2019

February 27, 2019

Last week I was at TreeHacks 2019 in sunny Palo Alto, California ☀️. We worked hard over the weekend building an app called Citizen X, and won first place in two prize categories (“Best App for Civic Technology” and “Best Use of SoundHound API”)!

The Project

Citizen X uses a mixture of several interesting technologies to let you use your voice to engage with your local, state, and national representatives. Users can say things like “Who are my local representatives?” and “Tell me more about Keisha Lance Bottoms” (the Mayor of Atlanta). The app gives back lots of useful information about the representative and encourages you to engage with them on social platforms like Twitter (or even plain old email).

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Announcing Window 3.0

December 16, 2018

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Window for iOS and Window for Apple Watch

Window 3.0 is now available on the App Store. This is a huge update with lots of awesome new features. The app has had a major overhaul. It’s now way easier to use, but at the same time lets you do more than ever. There’s a new Dashboard screen that’s your one-stop shop for managing your eating windows, and a new Timeline screen that shows you the complete picture of all your windows and fasts. You can now use Window on Apple Watch, with Siri, and even from your phone’s lock screen.

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Recap: MHacks 11

October 20, 2018

This weekend I was at MHacks 11 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We had an awesome time building a game called Recorder Hero, and got to use some cool technologies that I’ve been wanting to try out for a long time!

The Project

Recorder Hero is like Guitar Hero, but for the Recorder. You know – that instrument that every kid in America learned to play in elementary school. The game has a playlist of hit songs, ranging from Hot Cross Buns to Party Rock Anthem, that you can learn to play on a handheld digital recorder (your iPhone).

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My Summer at Apple

August 18, 2018

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WWDC with other Georgia Tech interns!

This summer I interned on the Developer Tools team at Apple! It was an amazing experience, and the sort of thing I had been dreaming about for years.[1] I got the chance to help improve the tools that we use every day, learn more about lower-level Apple technologies, and meet tons of other Apple engineers.

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