Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part two of this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will explore the basics of SpriteKit. If you missed out on the previous lesson, you can catch up by getting the code on GitHub. Remember that this tutorial requires Xcode 8 and Swift 3. Today, you will learn how to spawn the cat, spawn food, animate the cat and add sound effects and music. Let’s do it!
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In this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will explore the basics of SpriteKit. He will touch on SKPhysics, collisions, texture management, interactions, sound effects, music, buttons and SKScenes. The aim of this series is to get a good understanding of what goes into making a simple game. You can check in with us later on and use the code as a reference for future projects. I will keep updating the code base with interesting additions and refactoring. To get a taste of what you will be creating, check out the completed project.
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Buttons are a vital element in creating a smooth user experience, so it’s worth paying attention to the best essential practices for them. In this article, Nick Babich will show you the essential items you need to know in order to create effective controls that improve user experience, such as making buttons look like buttons, making the most important button clearly identifiable, or labeling buttons with what they do for users.
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How do you go about designing an app? Michael Flarup brings you an article about just that. A top level, somewhat simplified, and very honest overview of the steps involved in designing an app. This is an account of how most of the apps I work on are born, complete with shameless links to the tools he uses. Now when people think of ‘designing’ something, their thoughts often circle around the visual aspects of a product. Pixel pushing in Photoshop or laying grids in Sketch, but that’s a common misconception. Design, in the context of this article, covers the entire process. It is every deliberate action meant to produce something. The truth is that from the moment you get an idea, you are designing.
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Navigation is generally the vehicle that takes users where they want to go. When you examine the most successful interaction navigation designs of recent years, the clear winners are those who execute fundamentals flawlessly. While thinking outside the box is usually a good idea, there are some rules that you just can’t break. In this post, Nick Babich will help you better understand the principles of good navigation for mobile apps, then show you how it’s done using two popular patterns. The easier your product is for them to use, the more likely they are to use it.
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Peter-Paul Koch was granted access to Samsung’s browser engineers a few weeks in advance of the rest of the world, and because he wanted to get a grip on the non-Google Chromium market and understand Samsung’s goals and ideas, he interviewed Jungkee Song from the Samsung Internet team.
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With the React Native Universal Windows platform extension, you can now make your React Native applications run on the Universal Windows families of devices, including desktop, mobile, and Xbox. In this code story, Eric Rozell will walk you through the process of setting up a Universal Windows project for React Native, importing core Windows-specific modules to your JavaScript components, and running the app with Visual Studio.
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How do users interact with the app? What do they do in the app? In this article, Eduard Khorkov will compare some of the most popular mobile analytics systems. The process of adding analytics to an app involves consideration of many details, and his aim is to provide you with useful tips on implementing analytics. This information should help you find a mobile analytics system that fits your needs and should help you to properly implement it in your app.
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There are several actions you should take when improving an app engagement, but one of the most crucial is to get up close and personal with users. If you don’t segment and personalize your users’ journeys, then you should expect lower rates of conversion and retention. Understanding the individual user’s journey and how they are using the app overall is key to personalizing your mobile app experience. Mobile users have high expectations of the mobile experience and brief attention spans, so careful personalization and in-context awareness are crucial for effective communication and engagement with them.
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Not enough people know about the major advantages of web apps. They can replace all of the functions of native apps and websites at once. In this article, Ada Rose Cannon will show you some do’s and dont’s on how to make a progressive web app, as well as resources for further research. She’ll also go into the various components and support issues surrounding web apps. Although not every browser is friendly to them, there are still some compelling reasons to learn more about this technology.
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