Imagine this - the next time you put your car through the scheduled maintenance, the service folks replace all the internal parts with powerful, brand new ones that leverage the best of what current automobile technologies have to offer. You visit the service center to pick up your car and the service manager tells you that this is a pretty much brand new car he’s giving you back. With no visible changes on the exterior, you wonder what’s new - until you hit the gas pedal.
This is a close enough description of what we just did to Signeasy for iOS! We’re beyond thrilled to announce that in what is easily one of our biggest updates ever to Signeasy for iOS, we’re bringing to you the next level of delight. This release is a complete rewrite of our earlier version using the most advanced iOS technologies and programming frameworks.
The first ever lines of code for Signeasy were written back in 2009 by the founder Sunil Patro himself. We’re close to finishing 7 years now (psst.. our birthday is around the corner) and if you’ve stayed tuned, you already know that we’ve grown by leaps and bounds in terms of capabilities and features. The show never stopped and we kept on offering you the best eSignature experience while getting recognized on the way multiple times.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the moving parts to keep the show going increased significantly in complexity as well. With a growing engineering team, the code-base pooled in a mixed bag of programming practices. At the same time, programming paradigms kept at what they must do - evolving for better. As a young team focused on growing, we seek to outdo ourselves every time we build the next feature or an improvement. At the same time, the realization that the current state of our code-base could be slowing us down in releasing new features kept us on our toes.
So after a point, we very well knew that we need to pause, assess and rewrite the code that powers the Signeasy experience.
Our all-star iOS team buckled down and got right to it. Every developer loves a rewrite - for it brings the freedom to choose newer programming paradigms, standardizing coding practices for future generations and in the case of iOS, picking the programming language too. Our developers went for Swift - a robust and intuitive programming language created by Apple for building apps for iOS, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch. In an effort that spanned over 365 days (and nights), our iOS team kept at writing the code in Swift in the best way possible while making sure the scheduled feature releases are happening at their pace. Our QA team (the ones making sure you set your hands on the finest, bug-free version of the app) stepped up too, with automation of app testing and continuous testing going hand-in-hand with development.
In a nutshell, this is what our past year has looked like:
100,000 Lines of Code written.
10,800 Man and Woman hours.
706 Bugs found and squashed.
131 Internal Releases.
4 Testers.
3 Developers.
1 Goal.
Sounds incredible, right? Now before the ongoing engineering-speak irks and compels you to ask “ok, but what’s in it for me?”, I am going to put them out right here.
Faster
The earlier app versions had a lot of unnecessary blocking operations which may have left you staring at a spinner for a bit before you get on with your paperwork. The rewrite makes document loading time and processing when you sign much faster now. We’ve also minimized the use of alerts and made them more actionable to help you get your documents signed faster and be on your way.
Smoother
With Swift and React, the hottest programming paradigm out there at the moment, we were able to make screen transitions silky and response times immediate. And from the way our developers talk about it, I can tell you this makes developing the best user experiences a breeze - which is what we leveraged upon.
Better
Before the public release, we ran a Beta program with a group of our paid users for 2 months. This extended period gave us a lot of real-time feedback as we developed the app which we could incorporate right away. As our first Beta program at this scale - both in terms of the number of participants and the feature under development - we learned a tremendous amount. But more than anything else, we made Signeasy a whole lot better for you. If you would like to be a part of our beta testing user base, write back to us at [email protected].
Signeasy v7.0 is by far the biggest win and the one goal we were fixated on from Day 1. With a fresh, modern code-base that leverages the best of iOS technologies, there’s literally nothing holding us back with what we can build next and we couldn’t be more excited. You can click here to install or upgrade,
We’re eager to hear from you about your experiences or that you’d like to shake hands with our iOS developers. Either way, do write to us at [email protected].
If you are interested in knowing more about our process, look out for more posts on the behind the scenes, an engineering and product point of view.
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