My father, Fred Nachbaur, died of cancer in September of 2004. He was 53 years old. I had just moved to Canada not long before, and our relationship, which had always been complicated, never got the resolution that I think both of us probably wanted. He was brilliant, generous, stubborn, private, and deeply creative. He was a musician, an electronics/radio engineer, a programmer, and by all accounts the kind of person to whom cats would climb into his lap on a first visit.

I didn’t know him nearly as well as I wish I had, and the side I saw of him was very different than the one that others saw.

I’m happy to share that today is my 2-year anniversary at Okta! This would make more sense if I’d originally announced on this blog that I’d changed jobs and started working at Okta, so I’ll take a moment to recap what’s happened in the past two years, and some of the milestones and accomplishments I’m most proud of.

Before joining Okta, I worked at Salesforce for 10 years, and had many opportunities to move around within the mobile organization to kick start new products and teams, solve complex challenges, and grow personally and professionally along the way.

Someone on Twitter recently asked how to implement a TableView header that will stretch and resize as the content is scrolled, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes to provide a good example. Since I thought it’s a neat trick that’s often overlooked, I felt it was worthy of wrapping a post around it to explain how it works, maybe giving others the ability to replicate this pattern for themselves.

One of the “delightful” features of iOS is the almost imperceptible UI effects they add to give the illusion of depth. One of the most under-appreciated features is UIMotionEffect, which ties the device’s gyroscope to your views to make them adapt to how the user moves their phone.

This can be seen throughout iOS, from your lock screen to your app icons in Springboard (the iOS app launcher). Done right, the user won’t consciously notice these views moving, but it helps set certain views apart from the rest of the app’s UI, helping them “pop” and be more noticeably separate from the rest of the app.

In this post I’ll go over what UIMotionEffects are, how they work, and will share my approach for simplifying how to add motion effects throughout your application.