Cocoon - Stephen Radford

Fetch 2

27 March 2016 by Stephen Radford

Last year I started working on my first iOS app as a way to learn Swift. What I built turned out to be a fairly popular client for Put.io. With the release of the Apple TV, porting the app was a no brainer and with it came additional features — chiefly the matching of posters and metadata. After a couple of updates my attention moved back to the iPhone and iPad in November, and for the last 5 months I've been working on a huge update… What's new? There's a lot of new stuff in Fetch 2 — from minor tweaks…

Fetch for  tv

27 October 2015 by Stephen Radford

Since building Fetch, the thing I wanted most was improved AirPlay support. Apple did even better than that though an enabled developers to natively build apps using TVML or UIKit for the new Apple TV. From iOS → tvOS Fetch was a pre-existing app for both iPhone and iPad so moving things like the pre-existing PutioKit that connected to and mapped the Put.io API was easy. The trickiest part of porting to the Apple TV was figuring out what the interface was going to be. Interacting with an iPhone is a solitary, intimate experience. Small UI elements that can't be…

Content blockers are easy. Content blockers are hard.

08 October 2015 by Stephen Radford

So today, Mr. Crumble — Cocoon's latest app — is out. It's a content blocker for iOS 9 but unlike other content blockers it's not bothered about ads but instead it targets those annoying EU cookie banners. Building a content blocker is both easy and hard at the same time. Wait what? What I mean by that is building the the actual app couldn't be easier. It's basically a shell with a background task to fetch updates from a database every few hours. Now that's where the hard part is… Assembling a database. Assembling a database Apple allows content blockers two options:…

I just quit my job

23 February 2015 by Stephen Radford

Last Monday I quit my job. Well, me and Paul both quit our jobs and we're going full time at Cocoon. I'm scared and excited at the same time but mostly everything feels pretty surreal right now. It's great to finally be able to talk about it all. Oh shit, is this actually happening? Whoa, big decision Oh yeah, this wasn't some rash decision. Let me backtrack a second and tell you about how we came to it. In 2012 I made a little SaaS app (for myself really) called FTPloy. I was lucky enough to be a finalist in…