Employee One
CurrentFlipboard is the worlds first social magazine. Launched in July of 2010, Flipboard was selected by Apple as iPad App of the Year.Being the first employee at a time when Flipboard did not yet have a name, or even a solid concept, I was in a position to envision and build out many of the core ideas that became the foundations of the product as it is today.- Flipboard's "Readability Engine" : Secret sauce behind Flipboard's ability to turn any link on the internet into magazine-layout friendly formatting. Involves scoring and understanding the contents of webpages based on a set of heuristics and extracting the most relevant parts. - Flipboard's signature half-page flip effect : Built using Core Animation on iOS for navigation between arbitrary views. A snapshot and 3D transform technique combined with touch tracking, giving Flipboard a very effective and fast metaphor for navigating content.- Early prototyping of Flipboard's fluid space-filling grid layout system, laying out articles, photos, text automatically.- Asynchronous feed processing back-end : Capable of extracting contents from links in entire twitter feeds, providing the data for Flipboard's magazine layout continuously as the user navigates through a feed, giving Flipboard its perceived speed. Scaled 10,000x usage in a matter of weeks, from beta pool to launch.- Social Network integration (Facebook, Twitter) : Authentication, account management, feed synchronizing, and various social actions on respective social networks such as sharing, liking, commenting, retweeting, giving Flipboard's its social aspect.
