You will always be remembered!
We changed the Welcome-screen in the Mastodon-app for iPhone and iPad. The old screen was fancy and so is the new one.
About six months ago, when I opened the Mastodon-app for the very first time, I immediately noticed the very playful Welcome-screen: When you tilt your iPhone, there's this parallax-effect; the elephants move.
But I already knew, what Mastodon is, I had an account on a server and just wanted to sign in. I get it: This whole servers/community-thing can be a bit confusing and makes it hard(er) to join Mastodon. So the folks at Lickability redesigned that screen, they added some educational texts and instead of the parallax-effect, there was this new, fancy swipe-effect.
I had to change vacation plans in January and suddenly I was bored, had lots of free time and so I built this thing. In the end, after some polish from Markus, it looked like this:
A little technical sidenote: First I used a UIPageViewController with some UIScrollViewDelegate-magic , but scrolling wasn't smooth, so I replaced the whole thing with a UICollectionView-based approach. This worked pretty well in the end.
Two weeks ago or so, we changed the Welcome-screen again. The educational texts are still there, but slightly hidden and we made it easier to join mastodon.social. This is how the screen looks now:
First, I was a bit sad, that we had to throw out a screen that quickly. A screen that took me some time to build. But that's what I do: I build things.
Nevertheless, I just wanted to save this memory somewhere, that's the reason for this short blogpost. Having the wobbly, playful parallax-effect back feels nice though. And I may learned some things along the way.