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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Imagine how your excitement after posting a blog and seeing so many visitors talking about it, turns to dismay as they start to tweet that your website is down — a database connection error is shown. Many of these mobile users access the Web via slow data connections and crowded public Wi-Fi. So, anything you can do to ensure that your website loads quickly will benefit those users. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you Varnish Web application accelerator, a free and simple thing that makes a world of difference when a lot of people land on your website all at once.
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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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In this article, Bryson Meunier would like to audit the US version of Disney Junior. He has chosen this website for three reasons: it’s not run by a client or a partner; it exhibits a lot of the SEO issues of many responsive websites; and his two and four year olds are huge fans of the brand and often use my smartphone or our family iPad to visit it. This audit of Disney’s beautiful but often frustrating website shows that mobile SEO doesn’t end once you’ve made a website responsive, and it gives Disney a framework to make its website more usable and findable on search engines.
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Much of that page weight could be reduced if images were conditionally optimized based on device width, pixel density and modern image formats. These reductions would result in faster loading times, but the debate isn’t about whether to optimize images for different devices, but about how to go about doing so. In this article, Shawn Jansepar will take a look at Mobify.js, which lets us generate small images for small devices from a single high-resolution image.
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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 this article Ronan Cremin explains how to use RESS (responsive design with server-side components) to make significant performance and reach improvements to a website for both mobile and desktop devices alike. Your website will change from one that works on desktops, tablets and smartphones to one that works on almost anything anywhere and loads faster in all cases. It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of this, but if you need a good case study, read about what happened to YouTube when Google lightened its pages…
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The dream of a “magical” image format that will solve the responsive images problem lives on. Yoav Weiss started wondering if such an image format could be used to solve both the art direction and resolution-switching use cases. So he created a prototype to prove its feasibility. The prototype is now available, ready to be tinkered with. In this post, Yoav explains what this prototype does, what it cannot do, how it works, and its advantages and disadvantages relative to markup solutions.
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