It all started with a ‘Hackweek.’ Hackweek is a creative week that all our team members get after they finish working on a project. During this week our developers spend time building projects that typically end up on Github.
When we introduced Hackweeks about a year ago, we couldn’t even imagine what results this would bring. It turns out that giving away creative solutions for free can grow into a powerful marketing strategy. At least, this is how it worked out for our company.
We published our first Hackweek project on Github in January 2015 – a library called Side Menu Animation for Android. As of today, it has earned 2,649 stars.
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After publishing the Side Menu Animation, we built more iOS and Android libraries for Github. 12 months and 36 repositories later, Yalantis landed on Github’s list of top organizations among Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other top tech companies. Last month, Sitepoint included us in an article on the 7 best resources for web and mobile app animations.
It took us only one year to hit Github’s list of top organizations. It feels like the time has come to give back to the community that helped us get where we are today. So...
How can you get popular on Github?
1. Make a Remarkable Project
There are at least three ways you can make your source code remarkable: 1) build a tool that solves a problem or improves an existing solution, 2) break a traditional concept and create your own, or 3) spot trends.
1. Build a tool that solves a problem or improves an existing solution.
There are more than 30 million repositories on Github. But that doesn’t mean that all problems are solved. Far from it, actually. Even if there’s no obvious problem, there are a lot of existing solutions that could be built better. This is especially true when it comes to Android app development.
The projects Koloda and uCrop are two of our most popular animations on Github. These libraries offer alternatives to existing solutions – albeit great improved alternatives.
Koloda is our version of Tinder’s card-swipe functionality. A lot of developers have already implemented similar solutions, but we weren’t satisfied with any other them. We decided to make swipe-left-to-like-and-right-to-pass much simpler. Our take includes:
- API designed in a native way
- A reverse previous card feature
- A fully customisable library
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uCrop is a cropping library for Android. There are already plenty of libraries for image cropping on Android, but none of them satisfied our requirements. We decided to make our own version of an image cropper with the following features:
- Support for any crop ratio.
- Gesture-based scaling, translation, and rotation of images.
- A solution to prevent empty space inside crop bounds.
- A ready-to-use crop Activity, and the possibility to use the underlying Crop view on its own.
uCrop has received huge support from the tech community on Github and even on Product Hunt. We just learned that it’s made its way into the new version of the Thirsty app, a social app that keeps people motivated to achieve new things.
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2. Break a traditional concept and create your own.
The majority of apps you have on your mobile phone have similar interface elements. Think of a sidebar menu. When you tap on the menu icon, the menu appears, pushing all content to the side. Sure, it’s practical and familiar. The menu does what it is supposed to do. But it’s just a bit too predictable. In other words… boring!
That’s why we came up with the Guillotine Menu (check out the component for iOS and Android). This component offers a much more creative way of displaying a menu. It falls down from the top in an entertaining manner when you tap on an icon.
Your idea doesn’t necessarily have to solve a problem. If you get creative and reinvent a concept, you can always draw people’s attention.
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Continue reading %How Github Became Our Best Marketing Tool%
by Emilia Hansen via SitePoint
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