Nicholas Shipes is a multidisciplinary software engineer and designer based in Seattle with 13 years of experience blending interface design, iOS/macOS development, and visual/kinetic craft. He pairs an architecture background from UT Austin with hands-on expertise in Swift, Objective-C, JavaScript and creative toolchains like AfterEffects and Cinema 4D to deliver polished, interaction-driven products. Nicholas has contributed to notable open-source iOS UI projects—improving callout drawing, custom view support, gesture-driven media focus animations, and physics-based interactions—demonstrating attention to both pixel detail and motion. Equally comfortable sketching brand identity as he is tuning UIDynamics or CoreGraphics, he brings a systems-minded aesthetic to UX problems. Outside work he channels creativity into motorcycles, mountains, and audio production, which often informs his approach to tactile, sensory interfaces.
13 years of coding experience
Bachelor, Architecture, Bachelor, Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin
An easy-to-use view controller that animates thumbnail previews of your media to their full size versions with physics similar to Tweetbot 3.
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (iOS)
Contributions:4 releases, 76 commits, 6 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily contributed to the development of an iOS view controller, URBMediaFocusViewController, designed to animate media thumbnails to full-size versions. Their work included implementing the initial version and subsequent revisions, encompassing gesture recognizer setups (pinch, pan, double-tap), physics-based animations using UIDynamics, and handling image loading (including animated GIFs). They enhanced functionality by incorporating parallax and blur effects for background presentation, supporting various device orientations, and adding features like saving/copying images and dismissing the view with tap gestures.
A lightweight callout view class for iOS mimicking UICalloutView.
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (iOS)
Contributions:5 commits in 27 days
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily focused on enhancing the `SMCalloutView` class, a lightweight callout view for iOS, by modifying its background drawing using CoreGraphics. They added support for custom views within the callout for flexible height management. Furthermore, the user addressed touch interception issues when utilizing the "add-inside-the-pin" method within a sample project, improving the usability of the callout within the iOS application. Subsequent changes refined the color scheme to align more closely with the native iOS callout style.
cocoapodsswiftiosclass-viewswiftui
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