Bond
Handwritten Notes
About The Client
Bond makes it simple to place your message into anyone's hands. Thousands of customers – both individuals and businesses – use Bond’s technology to create a personal impression through handwritten notes. With Bond’s amazing robots, customers send handwritten notes on customizable stationery, straight from their phone or computer.
Work Carried Out
Montrose Software was hired to develop an iOS app which extends Bond.co’s offering of platforms for users to send Handwritten notes from. We integrated the app with Bonds custom REST API, and implemented the core business functionality. The app is used by thousands of customers, delivering an easy and intuitive on the go experience.
As a part of the application, we developed a near real time predictive system to calculate a perfect handwriting layout, based on the message content and canvas size. Since Bond’s handwriting robots generate the text with a level of randomness for each letter, as to guarantee the handwritten look of the final product, there is no clear way of estimating the space taken by the message placed onto the canvas. Each letter can have a different width, since its variation is calculated during the render time, based on a random seed.
To solve this, we created a system that alerts the user while writing their message, that it is too big to fit on the canvas. This would only happen previously, if automatic font scaling inside the app reached the maximum font size allowed for any given message. The Bond app queries the text renderer in the background, based on each word typed, to check if the message is still within the handwriting limits. We implemented automatic throttling to limit the number of queries and width prediction, delivering real time speed, whilst waiting for server response.
Technologies and Integrations
The app boasts many integrations to external services, driving new feature developments based on customer metrics and behavior. We integrated closely with the Mixpanel service, to track customer behavior within the app, and AB test new features before releasing into the public domain.
Cocoapods
Branch.io
iOS
Stripe
Bitrise
Mixpanel
Agile
Swift
It was delightful working with them because, in a lot of ways, I knew more about what was happening on their team than with some of my own. They also went above and beyond to make sure that everything was well documented and easily understood, which was great. Montrose Software is one of the best development groups that I’ve worked with. Compared to other agencies that are in it for the money, the team really cared about their work. They treated our app as if it were their own, which was evident in the end product. Ultimately, they exceeded our expectations in every way.
Director of Product, Bond
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