I'm a software engineer, author, and photography enthusiast from Leicester, UK.
I build products for the web, iOS, Android & OS X using things like Swift, AngularJS, Laravel and WordPress. Sometimes I write about those things too.
Currently I'm one half of Cocoon where you can hire me.
Ever since the EU decided it was a good idea to annoy the world with notices of cookies I've wanted to block them. With iOS 9, Apple gave us a way to block them in Safari using Content Blockers.
Mr. Crumble gets rid of them by using a central database that keeps its app up to date. It's entriely built in Swift with the serverside stuff in Laravel 5.
I've been a big fan of Put.io for a long time but there was a severe lack of a really good iOS client. I decided to change that and built Fetch. The app allows you manage files, watch videos and sync your position and even cast them to a Chromecast or other compatible device.
It was built entirely in Swift with the help of some packages like ConnectSDK, Alamofire and SwiftyJSON.
Poolside FM truly is the sound of the summer. The only problem is that it requires you to keep a tab always open in your browser and if you don't like a track or need to pause it you can't use the media keys.
After doing a bit of snooping I stumbled upon their API. After pitching the idea of an OS X menubar app to Marty and Grant at Poolside FM I built the thing in Swift.
SellFormula wanted an iOS App to accompany their reverse-commerce website. The app features a barcode scanner to allow users to quickly search and sell their excess baby formula.
Built in Swift, it uses the Alamofire and SwiftyJSON frameworks to liase with their API nicely.
During my time at Three Thinking, I was tasked to build an iOS and Android app for BM Catalysts to essentially digitise their catalogue. Rather than building the same app twice, I used Ionic to build a native feeling experience for both platforms.
The app connects to their server to download and parse the catalogue into a SQLite database stored on the device. This was done to enable the catalogue to be accessed offline by salespersons or mechanics when working in out of signal areas.
Initially a side project nominated for a net award in 2013. FTPloy is now one of our main products at Cocoon and has helped developers push over a million deployments to various servers.
Former is a web app built using Laravel and Backbone.js. The service allows for the quick and easy creation of free, hosted forms that can be linked to or embedded in a website.
WOOit is the newest, hot deals website. The site is built using WordPress as a core. I developed a custom API plugin to allow us to tap into for the autocomplete search and product filtering. There's also the potential this could extend to mobile apps later.
Cocoon was approached by Tapdaq — an ad platform for mobile — to design and build their new blog. I built a custom WordPress theme using things like Less and AngularJS and included things like a custom live search and Path inspired share button.
Nelly Duff is a London gallery that needed assistance and support to maintain and build upon their custom platform built atop Woocommerce. The platform allows them to manage all aspects of their business and includes things like a POS system that can be accessed from an iPad. My role has primarily been maintenance of the system as well as adding new features.
Hammer are a creative ad agency based in Los Angeles. Their web designer contacted me to build their new site in WordPress and had ideas in mind as to how it would need to function, including some parallax effects. I built a custom WordPress theme and used some custom AngularJS directives to achieve the desired result.
I often have clients wanting the same things in each project and have found myself building the same functionality time and time again. To combat this I've built and released a couple of open-source WordPress plugins.
Limit Post Titles allows a character limit to be enforced on the title within the CMS. The limit can be enabled or disabled for specific blog posts and was built to stop titles from being too wordy.
Social Stream aims to combine Twitter and WordPress posts from specific accounts with the posts from the WordPress blog. The plugin allows this to be displayed on the site in a variety of ways and includes PHP functions and shortcodes for maximum flexibility.
I'd often thought about writing a book having written for sites such as Nettuts+ in the past and when Packt contacted me about writing one focusing on AngularJS and Bootstrap I jumped at the idea.
The book is aimed at beginners with little or no experience of Bootstrap or Angular and walks through the building of a contacts manager.