Dotto

At Snow Digital, we are dedicated to crafting cutting-edge mobile solutions. As part of our commitment to pushing the boundaries of mobile technology, we developed Dotto as an internal proof-of-concept. This project aimed to explore the limits of on-screen graphics rendering with Skia, addressing a common challenge in mobile app performance and showcasing our expertise in mobile UI/UX and performance optimization.

Challenge

Many mobile applications, particularly design, gaming, and education apps, face performance limitations when dealing with complex graphics and real-time user interactions, especially gesture-based input in drawing or annotation capabilities. This results in a laggy, unresponsive user experience.

Solution

We developed Dotto, a publicly available mobile annotation tool, leveraging Skia for hardware-accelerated graphics rendering. This allows users to experience exceptionally smooth and responsive drawing, even with complex annotations. With the intuitive gesture-based interface, users can easily annotate and modify images with single-tap annotations and double-tap removals. Dotto demonstrates the potential for creating highly interactive and performant mobile applications.

Our Process

The Dotto Proof of Concept followed a streamlined development process focused on rapid exploration and immediate performance assessment. We began by isolating key Skia functionalities relevant to high-performance rendering. This was followed by iterative prototyping, where we quickly implemented and tested various rendering techniques. Our focus was on direct performance analysis, allowing us to rapidly understand Skia's impact on complex mobile UI/UX scenarios. This process enabled us to efficiently evaluate Skia's potential for future client projects.

Impact

Dotto demonstrated a significant improvement in rendering speed compared to traditional canvas implementations. This translates to a reduction in annotation time due to improved responsiveness. Internal surveys showed an increase in perceived smoothness and responsiveness compared to existing annotation tools.