Will the resources spent implementing app indexing for Google search be a boon or a bust for your app’s traffic? If your resources are limited and you’re wondering if app indexing would deliver enough traffic and installations to justify the effort, our experience would suggest you should focus on web content instead. In this article, Bryson Meunier will take you through a case study for app indexing at our company, the results of which may surprise you.
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How exactly does one make a “good” app icon? A beautiful, identifiable and memorable app icon can have a huge impact on the popularity and success of the app. In this article, Michael Flarup has put together some tips and advice to guide you on your way to designing great app icons. He’s been designing, making resources and giving talks about icon design for the past couple of years. In this article, and in the video at the end, he’ll sum up what he’s learned about this amazing craft.
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In the second part of this series, Christian Krammer will teach you more about using Sketch effectively for mobile app design. You will finish designing the music player that you started in part one. This includes creating the icons at the bottom, as well as making the music player responsive, so that all elements adapt to the width of the artboard and, thus, can be used for different device widths. Shapes are much easier to set up and modify, and you will still be able to combine them into more complex forms using Boolean operations.
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Have you tried experimenting with the Complications API? Thanks to the Complications API, every Android application can easily export the most important data and make it accessible at a glance directly on the user’s wrist, even without requiring a dedicated watch face. In this article, Daniele Bonaldo shows how to make your app’s data available directly from a wearable watch face, allowing the user to access it at a glance. You’ll also learn how to sync data between a phone and smartwatch, and how to display it using the new Complications API.
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Sketch is known for its tricky, advanced facets, but it’s not rocket science. We’ve got you covered with The Sketch Handbook which is filled with practical examples and tutorials that will help you get the most out of this mighty tool. In today’s article, Christian Krammer gives us a little taste of all the impressive designs Sketch is capable of bringing to life.
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The best way to convert a user on a mobile landing page is to provide a clear description of what you’re offering, along with obvious ways to contact you. Be clear in describing what your product does and how you’re solving your target customer’s problems. Get to the point of what you’re selling and show the user how to buy it or contact you. Creating landing pages with mobile users in mind will help you to focus on how best to convert people on smartphones. When building a landing page for any online campaign, take special care to consider the mobile experience. Review the presentation of content, as well as the prominence of contact information.
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Back in 2007, the world met the iPhone for the very first time. After Apple’s product debut, it took less than six months for work to begin on PhoneGap, which would become one of the first and most adopted frameworks for hybrid mobile app development — that is, for apps written simultaneously for multiple platforms using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than coded in native languages.
When compared with the prospect of learning an entirely new language and development environment in order to program iOS (and soon Android) apps, the appeal of this type of development to the already huge population of web developers in the world was palpable.
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What would Apple gain by letting developers build web apps that don’t need to go in the App Store? Is iOS holding us back? In this article, Stéphanie Walter presents some of the cool things you can do with APIs and other technologies to make your users’ lives easier. The future of the mobile browser is bright, shiny and fun. We can and will be able to build incredibly powerful things with web technologies.
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Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part three of this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will finish up the RainCat game and complete the introduction to SpriteKit.
This is lesson three in your RainCat journey. Today you will learn how to create options for muting sounds; game-quitting option; and a main menu — with buttons
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Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part two of this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will explore the basics of SpriteKit. If you missed out on the previous lesson, you can catch up by getting the code on GitHub. Remember that this tutorial requires Xcode 8 and Swift 3. Today, you will learn how to spawn the cat, spawn food, animate the cat and add sound effects and music. Let’s do it!
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