Today
What just landed and what is about to. Hold a First Look and, for one episode, it struck back.
Any episode’s official cuts, reachable again from the series archive: here, Malice in The Exiled Heavy Knight.
Anime Frontier · native iOS · in development
Know what’s next.
Watch it the moment it lands.
Anime Frontier is a native iPhone app I’m building for anime fans: releases, schedules, discovery, official video and music in one place, so nobody has to piece the answer together across services.
Runs on my iPhone every day. Public release still ahead.
01 / A one-time cinematic event
Kaiju Girl Caramelise · Episode 11 · First Look · recorded on my iPhone, 6 Sep
Hold the card.
The episode strikes.
For episode 11 of Kaiju Girl Caramelise I made a cinematic event that existed for one release: five drawings, timed on the app’s animation clock, that fire the instant a fan holds the First Look card in the days before the episode lands. The strike plays over the official cut, then the cut lifts.
Impact frames are the medium’s own punctuation, and I wanted a release to feel like one. The sequence is keyed to a single official still and the page it came from, so it can only ever play on that cut. When the episode aired the card moved on to its Moment and the event was over, the way a premiere is. Earlier episodes now stay reachable in the series archive, so the cut and its strike are never lost.
The exposure sheet
Holdtouch-down
Compression6 ticks
Contact5 ticks
Compression2 ticks
Color5 ticks
Recovery8 ticks
The cutlifts
Twenty-six ticks at 120 Hz, 216 milliseconds from the first drawing to the original. Lifting the finger cancels it. Opening the room can never start a second strike. Every other card keeps the plain press.
02 / Five surfaces, one fan
Fresh captures from the running app
Every question a fan asks,
answered where they’d look for it.
Watchlist
Your next move first, then the runway of everything you follow.
Each ready episode carries watched, tonight and later, one tap each.
Schedule
The season runway, local airtimes, and a countdown to the exact episode.
Tomorrow and the week ahead; a slot becomes the episode room once the release is verified.
Frontier
Anime news distilled: verified headlines, then the official wire.
Anniversaries, collaborations and events get their own lane; announcements follow.
Music
Your season in sound: official themes from the shows you follow.
A native queue, every track tied back to its series.
03 / The tour
75 seconds · captioned · silent
The whole idea,
in a minute and a quarter.
From the question a fan asks to the interaction that had to feel right. Edited from development captures and one recorded interaction at original speed.
04 / One engineering decision
SwiftUI · UIKit · interaction state
A passing test.
A swipe that felt wrong.
In everyday use, an artwork page enlarged as it left the screen. The viewer opened, paged and closed correctly, so a test that only checked the settled screen never saw it.
Selection was driving layout. Halfway through a drag the selected item changed, and the outgoing image switched from fitting the viewport to filling it while it was still visible.
Viewer mode now owns framing; selection only names the current image and what gets shared. The two no longer compete mid-gesture. Verified with slow drags across the boundary in both directions, then zoom, save, share and return.
Actual recordings at original speed. Same drag, same artwork.
05 / How it’s built
Swift · SwiftUI · UIKit · Python
Native where it matters,
verified before it’s shown.
SwiftUI, with UIKit where it earns its place
Surfaces are SwiftUI. Players, gesture recognizers, sharing and original-file export drop to UIKit and AVFoundation when the interaction needs them. Expensive work stays off the main thread; the original bytes of an image are what get shared.
One shared Swift package
Domain models, decoders and the policies that decide what a screen shows live in a package the app imports. Most of it is pure functions with tests, so a rule about identity, freshness or framing is written once and holds everywhere.
A service that checks its sources
A Python service follows official and editorial sources, verifies what it finds, and composes it into a snapshot the app can trust. Verified means a source was checked, not a badge that was typed.
06 / How I work
Care enough
to go back.
I founded and direct Anime Frontier: the fan problem, the product priorities, and reviewing every build on my own iPhone.
The work is in the repeated decisions that make it more useful, more responsive and more coherent. Inspect the result, challenge what feels wrong, find the cause, verify the change in the app. Repeat.
This project taught me to look past a convincing demo. A release card needs the right data. A beautiful image needs the right source and crop. An interaction has to stay correct while it is moving. That combination of product care and engineering follow-through is what I want to bring to a mobile team.