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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
Getting an app just right, getting it to work across all possible devices, with different OS versions, display resolutions, chipsets and other hardware characteristics, and making the user experience smooth across all possible configurations, is a challenging task. In this article, Ville-Veikko Helppi will look at what’s available for testing React Native apps. He’ll explain some key features of React Native, before looking at how to implement these tests, and then he will categorize testing methods and frameworks on three levels, providing examples for each.
Read more…
Many people think localization is as simple as translating in-app content and app store pages. It’s more complex than that. In this article, Bruce Wong and Anna Pratskevich will look at the top Chinese apps, including local market leaders such as Dianping, the Yelp of China, and the few US apps that are successful in China, such as the NBA app and Uber, and discuss how content, graphics and tone can make or break an app’s success, providing you with a few valuable tips to get you started on the right path.
Read more…
Currently, GitHub Pages doesn’t offer a route-handling solution; the Pages system is intended to be a flat, simple mechanism for serving basic project content. GitHub does provide one morsel of customization for your project website: the ability to add a 404.html file and have it served as your custom error page. Turns out that many folks have experienced the same issue with GitHub Pages and liked the general idea. However, the problem that some folks on Twitter correctly raised was that the 404.html page is still served with a status code of 404. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and in this article, Daniel Bauchner decided to answer — and answer with vigor!
Read more…
