Who are you?
Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
I’m a basketball player from New York who happens to work on the Dribbble iOS app in my spare time.
In high school, my band teacher kicked me out of the upper-level band class my senior year because I was terrible at trumpet, so I took a programming class instead with my math teacher Mr. Vermes. He was a great teacher.
At that point and time, Apple was making great strides with the Mac. I fell in love with the “poof” animation when you drag something out of the dock. The wave ripples you see when you place a widget onto the dashboard. The Time Machine app. The Mac was functional yet hella fun. I remember frequenting macthemes.net a lot back then. There was definitely a relatively small but vibrant community around the Apple ecosystem.
When Mr. V gave us a particular homework assignment, I remember going home right away to work on it (the first and last time this happened.) It was an assignment to hook up this calculator UI. Fast forward a few years later, when the iPhone and really the SDK came out, I jumped on it. I’ve been riding that Steve Jobs wave ever since.
To me, apps, websites, and any technology really can be more than just a bunch of form fields, buttons, labels, and images. You take it further and make something magical. That’s what piqued my curiosity initially, and why I lace ‘em up every day.
What are you working on?
As of recently I’ve been working on push notifications in the Dribbble app. You can follow all your activity, messages, and jobs now. Since we launched the official Dribbble app, activity and push notifications were the #1 feature requests, so now the community can hear the sweet swoosh sound from their phone as they net likes on their shots.
Choose a favorite shot of yours. Why is it a favorite?
This shot demos the salad builder in the Sweetgreen app I remember just trying to wrap my head around all the logic and complexities when we first built that part of the app, while trying to come up with something cool and fun. I just stared at the problem, thinking things through for about a week before actually doing anything. An easy way out would have been to create a glorified web form with checkboxes, etc. But I prototyped in code having the current ingredient tiles sweeping out from a grid to a row and bringing up the ingredients you could add—almost like an emoji keyboard. And when you pick a new ingredient it hops up to the top line. It worked, and it feels fun. I think its probably my best example of trying something crazy and having it working out.
Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot (e.g. hardware, software, pens, paper, blowtorch)?
I keep it simple. I just walk around with many iPhones like Drake in hotline bling. I’ve got a 15” Touchbar MacBook. iPhone X. iPad Pro. A bunch of older phones. Xcode, Sketch, Photoshop, Textmate, After Effects.
Choose a favorite shot from another Player. Why do you dig it?
Sorry, I have to choose two.
Alexander is great. We worked on Balllin’ together, the unofficial Dribbble app I designed. Alexander’s esthetic feels home on Mac and everything he’s does has me at hello.
Redbull playlist covers by the homie Jordan out in Venice, CA. The choice of colors, hues, and composition hits my funny bone and asserts a level of sophistication.
Find Devin on Dribbble, Twitter, and devinross.com.
Find more Interviews stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact stories@dribbble.com.
