This is a demo video I made that shows a “newsfeed” component for the bPay pilot project I worked on at a previous employer. I cannot share this code because it belongs to the owners of bPay, but I thought I’d share this video to show the concept in action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXu_XlXShTs

The video starts by showing the option available by cycling through the possible layouts. It isn’t necessarily the case that the deployed version would use multiple layouts. The end of the video shows what it may look like in production with a specific layout chosen.

Features

• All screen components and animations are 100% native.
• The layout of the screen is dynamic and is fetched from a “newsfeed server”.
• The tiles shown on each screen are dynamic and are fetched from a “newsfeed server”.
• The server defines the action each tile can make.
• The server defines the timing between screen and tile flips.

This means that all of the content can be changed on the server at any time without requiring an update to the app.

Motivation

The Newsfeed was born after being asked to make the front screen of the app a “webpage” so that the business could change content on a whim. I proposed what I designed above so that we could keep the entire app native, and allow for some pretty cool things to be done with the backend if we chose to. I was certainly inspired by Windows 8 live tiles.