Engineering Weekly Round Up – May 14th

Here’s what our engineering team has been talking about over the last week.

1. Facebook Open-Sources The Animation Engine That Powers Its Paper App ow.ly/wQNmu

Facebook open-sourced POP, the animation framework that it used to create a lot of the animations and interaction in its recently released Paper app for iOS. The framework looks promising, but it also seems like it duplicates some of the UIKit Dynamics classes that Apple released with iOS7.

2. Google Play Services Update 4.4 ow.ly/wQNIP

Google released a new update for Google Play Services last week. It contains an update to the Google Maps API that allows developer to embed interactive Street View imagery. This new update shows off one of the benefits of Play Services – we get updates much faster than we used to. Still, there’s concern in the Android community that Google is getting to much control over a development platform that was supposed to be open for all.

3. Opportunity in Wearables

One of our engineering team members, Beth Mezias, recently attended two events that focused on wearables: Mobile Monday, where Fitbit gave a presentation on mobile healthcare, and Wearable Wednesdays. One of the major themes at both events was the large market for wearables with business applications, for example with UPS or Fed Ex, warehouse workers or medical professionals.

Filed under: Product Engineering | Topics: android, engineering, Facebook, platforms, Wearables