Huddleboard
Animated Playbook
Huddle up! I designed and developed the Huddleboard iPad app for sports coaches to quickly demonstrate a play or strategy to their team using animated player positions. I was given a brief description of the idea from a client, and tasked to bring the app to life. I created every aspect of this app; initial sketches, mockups, play surfaces, user experience, wrote interface elements, developed all functionality and published to the app store.
Record Plays
Tap the record button and move players as needed. Append additional player movements as you go.
Play Scrubber
Quickly scrub through the animations to find the exact moments for complex play recordings.
Drag and Drop
Easily move players and items around the play surface. Position everyone to capture the play.
Save & Edit Plays
Prepare plays before presenting them to the team, save plays and edit existing plays.
Share Plays
Send plays to coworkers and other members in your organization.
Buy Plays
Purchase historical or famous plays from the store. Study the pro plays and learn.
Draw & Annotate
Draw additional play lines and jot notes on the play surface to quickly communicate and emphasize your vision.
Path Colours
Set different path colours for easier identification of players or drawing attention to special movements.
Player Colours
Change the player colours for each team, or assign unique colours to specific players on the screen.
Zoom & Pan
Quickly pan around the play surface with three fingers and then switch to zooming in and out with two fingers on specific areas of the play surface.
Boundary Opacity
Help your players focus on the fundamentals of your play and not get distracted by extra visuals. Adjust the play surface boundary opacity to suit your needs.
Undo
Undo drawings, annotations and movement recordings. Full control to communicate the plays and your ideas.
Role
Freelancer. I was given a brief description of the idea from a client, and tasked to bring the app to life. I created every aspect of this app; initial sketches, mockups, play surfaces, user experience, wrote interface elements, developed all functionality, published to the app store, and also made a support/promotional website.
Challenges
Due to time constraints, not all of the graphics and interface elements were completely implemented programmatically. In the final release many buttons were semi-unstyled, and did not look like my initial mockups.
I made this app early in my career, and I was often learning the ins-and-outs of iOS app development and best coding practices as I went along. At the time of making this app, I didn't have a lot of reference points for how long it would take to develop such an app, so my completion estimates were wildly wrong.
Aspirations
I would love to rewrite this app in ReactNative just to see if I could get similar performance with the player position recordings.
Lessons
Small simple functions are the best. While writing this app and the apps before this one, I would often write bloated functions that did many things and were difficult to verify outputs in a consistent way. I didn't have the experience or knowledge of how to break up my code in ways that were maintainable and easy to read. I learned that writing small functions with explicit depenencies and reproducible outputs are the best for sane software development.
I am proud of…
My perserverance and determination to see this app through to completion. There were a lot of hurdles when developing the app and I am proud of myself for not giving up when I was feeling overwhelmed by the long todo list.
Tools
- Xcode
- Photoshop
Languages
- Objective-C