The Developer's Toolbox

by David Creemer ∙ December 01, 2014

Simple, Secure, Repeatable

Most of us live a connected life by default. I have six computers and three mobile devices that hold bits and pieces of my work and personal lives. As a software engineer that may be on the high end, but surely it’s not uncommon to have a computer or two, a shell account or VPS, a phone, and perhaps a tablet too.

On each device, I need different parts of my digital life:

accounts and passwords
configuration files and settings
applications
documents, source code, and so on.

Upgrading or replacing devices and restoring my usual environment has always been painful, so I resolved to automate a large part of this process once and for all. …

Flipboard's Approach to Automatic Summarization

by Yonatan Oren ∙ October 01, 2014

Bringing the beauty of print to the mobile interface is our all-encompassing vision at Flipboard; in doing so, we’ve learned that it’s necessary to provide our users with an experience dedicated solely to their content. With powerful magazine and topical recommendations, we’ve nearly perfected the way our users find stories, but never before, until now, have we tinkered with how our users read them. …

Introducing FLEX

by Ryan Olson ∙ July 24, 2014

At Flipboard, we place a high value on tools that speed up and improve the development process. Today, weʼre excited to announce that weʼre open sourcing an extensive in-app debugging tool for iOS.

The Flipboard Explorer, or FLEX, is a component that you can easily drop into any iOS project. When presented, FLEX shows a debugging toolbar that lives in a window above your app. From this toolbar, you can view and modify nearly every piece of state in the application. Unlike many other debugging tools…

How Flipboard plays animated GIFs on iOS

by Raphael Schaad ∙ May 29, 2014

Flipboard has always sought to “cook the raw web” and transform it into something that has the design elegance of a magazine. We consider many details – from the typography of articles, to the layout of photographs – to remain as faithful to the nature of content as possible.

When it came to animated GIFs, we knew we wanted them to play automatically in our app. Auto-play is one of the chief appeals of animated GIFs. However, many applications on iOS render animated GIFs as stills – an unfortunate result of the complexity of playing multiple GIFs simultaneously, and in real time, on a mobile device.

One would think that such an ancient image format would be supported out of the box for developers on modern iOS devices. But not even all of Apple’s own apps play them. …

Flipboard at AWS Summit 2014

by Joey Parsons ∙ April 10, 2014

About two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at Amazon’s AWS Summit 2014. During Andy Jassy’s keynote presentation, I discussed how we use Amazon Web Services in an efficient, performant, and cost-effective way.

When people think of Flipboard, what most often comes to mind is our application design – the beautiful, flippable reading experience millions of readers enjoy every day. What’s less well known is all of the data and serving architecture that goes into delivering that beautiful experience and ensuring it’s fast.…

Layout in Flipboard for Web and Windows

by Charles Ying ∙ March 24, 2014

At Flipboard, we are working hard to build the world’s best personal magazine—a magazine made just for you, filled with the stories you care about most.

Magazine layout design plays a key role in telling those stories. Good layout design frames a story and impacts how you are informed by the content. For example, in the hallways of Sports Illustrated, editors hang up every page of the print edition to be reviewed and manually tweaked before publication.

When you read Flipboard, articles and photographs are laid out in a series of pages you can flip through, just like in a print magazine. Each magazine page …

Yet another engineering blog

by Eric Feng ∙ March 23, 2014

Welcome to the brand new Flipboard engineering blog! I know what you’re thinking. You’ve seen this movie before. Interesting tech projects mixed with industry insights and a dash of unabashed recruiting sprinkled in.

That does sound like a formula, but I hope there’s something else that you’ll find …