Anno Amsterdam

My role

Frontend, natively on both platforms

The problem

Amsterdam is lined with centuries-old buildings, each holding a story, and almost all of those stories stay hidden in plain sight. No guidebook covers the ordinary house you happen to be standing in front of.

How it works

• Map-first browsing. The map is the home screen, not a feature buried in a tab, with filtering by century, a list of what is near you, and detail pages holding photographs, timelines and routes.
• The AR view. Point the camera at a facade and the building's year and history appear over the street. The part that sells the app in ten seconds, and the part that took longest to make dependable.
• Provenance in the interface. Heritage photographs arrive with a source, a copyright holder and a date attached, and all three had to stay visible. That constraint shaped the gallery more than any aesthetic decision did.
• Two codebases, one design: Kotlin for Android, Swift for iOS.

Stack

Kotlin for Android, Swift for iOS, native map integration on both platforms, AR components, Figma.

What I take from it

Scope arrives as intent, not as a specification. Lyn and Pieter did not hand us a feature list, they said they wanted people to notice the buildings they walk past every day. Turning that into screens, states and edge cases was most of the work, and it is the part I got better at. The other lesson was physical: AR and location fail in the field, not in the simulator. Walking the streets with a build changed the design more than any meeting did.

Outcome

Built for the city's 750th anniversary. This is also the project that pushed me towards UI/UX in the first place.