I co-taught the UT-Austin Mobile Apps class with Robert Quigley in the spring 2014 semester - the class is a collaboration between the Department of Journalism and the Department of Computer Science where students from both departments form teams of five and create mobile apps.

Right before the final demo day, one of the teams, Sono, was showing off their app. It’s a sound recording app for journalists and students, and the key feature is the audio recording. They had a nice custom tab bar, but they wanted it to go away when they were recording, and then come back. I talked to them about doing a simple fade-in/fade-out effect, but I got pretty excited about doing something a little more interesting - what if you could have the toolbar buttons fly away, and then come back?

I went to the right-off-campus Starbucks after class, sat down with an iced coffee for two hours, and coded up JLAwesomeToolbar  - then published it on GitHub with an open source license. They were able to adapt it into their app and show it off during their final demo two  days later, so I was extremely impressed with the coding capability. Here’s a video preview of the effect from YouTube: