What practical steps can you take to make your brand more approachable for mobile users? While general statistics are useful for demonstrating the value of designing with mobile in mind, they don’t provide the guidance necessary to understand precisely how users will interact with a particular brand on their phone. Google Analytics offers a number of free features for incredibly detailed analysis of mobile activity, with the ability to easily compare to desktop activity.
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This is the third installment in a series covering four ways to develop a mobile application. In previous articles, we examined how to build a native iOS and native Android tip calculator. In this article, Peter Traeg will create a multi-platform solution using PhoneGap. As with the previous articles in this series, all of the code for our application may be obtained from a GitHub repository.
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Transformations are a powerful technique for separating content and presentation in Web applications. Yet, they transformations have failed to gain popularity through XSLT. For this reason, Web developers are liable to think that transformations “don’t apply to me,” even though they work with HTML. Thankfully, new transformation frameworks are on the horizon, that hold the promise of a revival. In this article, Ishan Anand will reintroduce transformations and explore their applications to mobile and responsive design.
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This is the second in a series of four articles covering four ways to develop mobile applications. Today, Peter Traeg will look at how to build the same sort of application using native Android tools. This simple tip calculator contains two screens: a main view and a settings view. The settings view persists the default tip percentage to local storage using Android’s SDK support.
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Businesses are learning new ways to leverage data to improve themselves on a daily basis. They’re realizing that data collection and data analysis have a measurable return on investment, and decision-makers are asking to see them. Google Tag Manager is a relatively new system in which all of the different Google code snippets for a website or mobile application can be organized and controlled through a drag-and-drop interface in a Web browser. For this article, Drew Thomas will talk about adding Google Analytics to a mobile application, using the very future-proof Google Tag Manager to implement it.
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95% of downloaded apps are abandoned within a month and 26% of apps are only used once, and depending on the user, these abandoned apps are deleted or ignored, never to be opened again. Lyndon Cerejo’s app graveyard is the final resting place for apps that he has downloaded but have since left neglected. The following are lessons from his app graveyard that he keeps in mind when designing apps, and they might help you, too.
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In this article, Peter Traeg provides an overview of how to build a simple mobile application using each of the following approaches. Few developers have had the opportunity to develop for mobile using a variety of tools, and this series is intended to broaden your scope. Hopefully you will be in a better position to choose the right development tools for your mobile application’s needs!
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Developing an application in HTML5 is a way to leverage code across multiple platforms, rather than having to write the application from scratch for each platform. As such, much of the user interface would be done in HTML. It’s important to understand the benefits each potential development strategy affords. As an app developer you have the ultimate decision on what strategy best suits the needs of your application. Test early, and test often, across a variety of devices. Keep your technology choices open and flexible to reap the rewards of a hybrid experience.
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In part one of this series, we got a customized magazine app for Windows 8 up and running. In this second and last part, we will look at how our magazine app obtains the articles to be shown, examine the transport protocol and set up a live content host. When done, our HTML5-based magazine app will essentially be ready to submit to the Windows Store.
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In 2010, Microsoft shifted its focus from propriety Web technology to open Web technology. This refocus materialized a few years later — in Internet Explorer, the Windows operating system, its developer tools and its cloud software and things have changed for the better so far. Across the board, Web developers should see significant improvements, making Windows an HTML5-friendly platform.
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