CategoryApps

January 8, 2019 — A search bar isn’t some throwaway design element. When your app promises a speedy and convenient experience to its users, a search bar can cut down on the time they have to spend inside it. So, as you work on creating better experiences for your mobile app users, spend some time thinking about the design of your app’s search bar. Things like placement, hint text, and the way search results are displayed contribute to how users engage with search as well as your app as a whole. Read more…

December 28, 2018 — The mobile web has definitely improved from where it was just a couple years ago. When it comes to the mobile user experience, are mobile websites all that bad? You hear so much about the benefits of building a dedicated native app, but that can become an incredibly costly gamble if users don’t take to it. That said, is the progressive web app the best choice? And will it eventually replace the mobile web and native apps? In this article, Suzanne Scacca explores this idea. Read more…

December 19, 2018 — A sighted user puts himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user. In this series, Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. Today, Chris experiences first-hand difficulties that visually impaired users face and describes what we can do as web developers to help. Read more…

December 10, 2018 — Building real-time applications is hard. However, GraphQL is rapidly upending this status-quo. In three simple steps you can quickly wire-up a fully-functional real-time app, without getting mired in unnecessary details such as setting up a websocket connection. That right there is the power of community tooling backing an abstraction like GraphQL. In this article, Sandip Devarkonda will explore what GraphQL is, and then take it for a spin by building a poll app in which users can vote and on-screen aggregated results are updated in real time. Read more…

November 28, 2018 — Throughout this tutorial, Ahmed Bouchefra introduces Angular Router and how you can use it to create client-side apps and Single Page Apps with routing and navigation. You will see how to use the Angular Router to add routing and navigation into our application. Also Ahmed will take a look at different concepts like the Router outlet, routes, and paths and we created a demo to practically show the different concepts. You can access the code from this repository. Read more…

November 27, 2018 — Progressive web applications (PWAs) are more of a methodology that involves a combination of technologies to make powerful web applications. In this article, Ankita Masand will look at the pain points of users who are browsing old non-PWA websites and the promise of PWAs to make the web great. You’ll learn most of the important technologies that make for cool PWAs, like service workers, web push notifications and IndexedDB. Read more…

November 14, 2018 — Ever since Pokémon Go brought augmented reality into consumers’ line of sight, marketers and developers have been looking for a way to hone AR’s power for their own purposes. If there ever was a time to jump on this game-changing bandwagon, it’s now. AR provides spatial and facial mapping technologies that will not only delight your users, but will improve the overall experience of interacting with your app’s brand. In this post Suzanne Scacca will provide you with examples of what’s being done in the AR space now and hopefully inspire your own efforts to bring this game-changing tech to your mobile app in the near future. Read more…

November 13, 2018 — Sending many transactional emails at once, if not architected properly, could become a bottleneck for the application and degrade the user experience. Part of the problem is connecting to the SMTP server from within the application, synchronously. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will explore how to send emails from outside the application, asynchronously, using a combination of AWS S3, Lambda, and SES. Read more…

October 18, 2018 — It’s an exciting time when your mobile app is ready to launch, but be careful. No matter how high you see those app store downloads go, don’t go rushing to celebrate just yet. There’s a more meaningful metric you should be paying attention to in order to determine the success of your app, and that’s the mobile app retention rate. Suzanne Scacca will explore what a good retention rate looks like for mobile apps. Let’s start with the basics. Read more…

October 11, 2018 — When creating mobile apps, you have to create and maintain the user interface and app logic for both iOS and Android separately: Objective-C/Swift with XCode and Java with Android Studio. That can quickly turn into a pain. With Xamarin.Forms, however, the UI and app logic for your app resides in a single codebase and you get to use a single IDE to maintain it all — saving time and headaches. In this article, take a lap around Xamarin.Forms to see what it can do for you. Read more…