Nic Raboy is an application developer that has been developing mobile applications as a hobby for the past five years. In this article, Nic is going to tell his story about mobile application development. He will look at some of the common problems with developing mobile applications, both native and hybrid, and how NativeScript by Telerik fills the gap. He’ll proceed to develop a NativeScript Android and iOS application from scratch, and then convert the same application to use the bleeding-edge Angular 2 JavaScript framework.
Read more…
DAU (noun) Daily active users. Hip-hop (noun) If you got to ask, you ain’t got it. In this article, Benjamin Hersh will talk about the unique challenges of designing a hip-hop app as he led design for one of the few successful apps in that space. Benjamin will share insights from his research and design process, and the lessons he and his team learned about the DAU of hip hop. This is not strictly an article about technical innovations. Benjamin’s focus is how an awareness of complex cultural issues can be critical for good app design.
Read more…
Studies reveal that 90% of all downloaded apps are used only once and then eventually deleted by users. Sometimes, when people finally download an app, they feel abandoned. You must clearly show users why they need your app. In this article, Anton Kosolapov will show you that for users to give your app a second chance, they need to understand a few things. The best way to communicate the purpose of your app is through an engaging onboarding experience.
Read more…
Melody Jams may not have made the creators millionaires, but it’s with no doubt an incredibly successful project. Since Melody Jams’ launch Jamie Kosoy and his team overcame massive technical, mental and physical challenges to produce something that is of really high quality. A certain kind of ruthlessness was required with the number of features they wanted to create. They had to go well out of their way to prove their trust to one another. And they had to constantly be making stuff to show each other, rather than just talking about what they were going to make.
Read more…
If you’ve ever written an iOS app beyond a trivial “Hello world” app with just one screen and a few views, then you might have noticed that a lot of code seems to “naturally” go into view controllers.
Because view controllers in iOS carry many responsibilities and are closely related to the app screens, a lot of code ends up being written in them because it’s just easier and faster that way.
Read more…
Imagine how great it would be to write your tests only once and run them on different platforms. Writing tests to guarantee bug-free software is not straightforward. However, the underlying technology to build a testing infrastructure should not be an impediment. Appium is a solution that protects you from the heterogeneity of mobile platforms and helps you focus on writing functional tests that can be run independent of platform. In this article, Antonio J. Roa-Valverde will show you how to build your own test automation environment for Android by relying on Appium. Hopefully, this guide will lower the barrier for you to build your own mobile test automation solution.
Read more…
In this part of the tutorial Nash Vail will start by replacing the photographer’s name with the actual wallpaper image along with proper credits. During this process you’ll learn how to link a library in Xcode, as well as more on general styling and positioning of UI elements. You will learn how to save pictures to the Camera Roll and also how to run your app on a physical device. To apply all your newly learned React Native skills there is a challenge waiting for you at the end. Just like the first part, this article has five sections. Completing each section takes us a step closer to finishing our app.
Read more…
These frameworks and the whole idea of building mobile apps with JavaScript never appealed to me, though. I always thought, why not just learn Swift/Objective-C or Java and build real apps? That definitely requires a significant amount of learning, but isn’t that what we developers do and should be good at? Quickly learn new languages and frameworks? What’s the point, then? For me, the advantages never outweighed the doubts.
Read more…
React has proved tremendously successful, both on Clayton Anderson’s own projects, and with many others around the web, including large companies like Netflix. And now with React Native, the framework has been brought to mobile. React Native is a great option for creating performant iOS and Android apps that feel at home on their respective platforms. In this article, Clayton will explain why he thinks you should consider using React Native, by providing an overview of the framework and what he believes to be its best features.
Read more…
In this article, Ksenia Sternina decided to analyze the physiology of using the interface of Mail.Ru’s Email app; for example, how comfortable is it to use an iPad app in typical positions? The behaviors we studied included tapping buttons while lying down, browsing photos while sitting, swiping, and writing text. Her results revealed a number of purely ergonomic problems that should be taken into account when developing any iPad app. The results are shown here on an iPad layout using a three-color schema. Controls located in the green zone are easily reachable by the average person; the yellow zone is still reachable but not as easily; and the red zone is the most inconvenient location for controls.
Read more…