is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Last fall my colleagues at Wildcard and I released Wildcard for iPhone, the first browser that lets you experience a different kind of mobile web, one that uses the card metaphor—fast, native, interactively rich—instead of the page metaphor. We’re continuing to evolve Wildcard for iPhone and have some really exciting things in development, but we think of our mission as broader than any one app. We want to effect a sea change in the way the mobile Internet works, and that means that we have to work on a number of fronts to spread the gospel about cards, so to speak.
Today we’re announcing another of these initiatives: the Wildcard SDK for iOS. This is a free toolset that lets third-party developers bring cards into their own native iOS apps quickly and easily. Once implemented, the SDK transforms hyperlinks that users might exchange in, say, a messaging app into fully functional, interactive, performant cards, and it does so on the fly, automatically. To emphasize: this happens in the context of the developer’s own app—the user is not taken anywhere else and engagement is not interrupted. The cards can appear in an elegant overlay or even directly in situ with the app’s original user interface, where they can be customized to blend into the look and feel seamlessly.
This short demonstration video illustrates the concept:
The SDK is available starting today at trywildcard.com/sdk. You can also read more about it in this blog post. If you’re an iOS developer, I encourage you to give it a try.
