Imagine how great it would be to write your tests only once and run them on different platforms. Writing tests to guarantee bug-free software is not straightforward. However, the underlying technology to build a testing infrastructure should not be an impediment. Appium is a solution that protects you from the heterogeneity of mobile platforms and helps you focus on writing functional tests that can be run independent of platform. In this article, Antonio J. Roa-Valverde will show you how to build your own test automation environment for Android by relying on Appium. Hopefully, this guide will lower the barrier for you to build your own mobile test automation solution.
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In this part of the tutorial Nash Vail will start by replacing the photographer’s name with the actual wallpaper image along with proper credits. During this process you’ll learn how to link a library in Xcode, as well as more on general styling and positioning of UI elements. You will learn how to save pictures to the Camera Roll and also how to run your app on a physical device. To apply all your newly learned React Native skills there is a challenge waiting for you at the end. Just like the first part, this article has five sections. Completing each section takes us a step closer to finishing our app.
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These frameworks and the whole idea of building mobile apps with JavaScript never appealed to me, though. I always thought, why not just learn Swift/Objective-C or Java and build real apps? That definitely requires a significant amount of learning, but isn’t that what we developers do and should be good at? Quickly learn new languages and frameworks? What’s the point, then? For me, the advantages never outweighed the doubts.
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React has proved tremendously successful, both on Clayton Anderson’s own projects, and with many others around the web, including large companies like Netflix. And now with React Native, the framework has been brought to mobile. React Native is a great option for creating performant iOS and Android apps that feel at home on their respective platforms. In this article, Clayton will explain why he thinks you should consider using React Native, by providing an overview of the framework and what he believes to be its best features.
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In this article, Ksenia Sternina decided to analyze the physiology of using the interface of Mail.Ru’s Email app; for example, how comfortable is it to use an iPad app in typical positions? The behaviors we studied included tapping buttons while lying down, browsing photos while sitting, swiping, and writing text. Her results revealed a number of purely ergonomic problems that should be taken into account when developing any iPad app. The results are shown here on an iPad layout using a three-color schema. Controls located in the green zone are easily reachable by the average person; the yellow zone is still reachable but not as easily; and the red zone is the most inconvenient location for controls.
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It is encouraging to see a big increase in mobile web adoption and Google has definitely proved it has the last word when it comes to SEO. Responsive web design is the big winner of the go-mobile race and will most likely continue to gather the spoils. However, the mobile web has a lot of room for growth when it comes to strategies, user experience or conversions. The new .app top-level web domain together with WordPress’s REST API and the emerging JavaScript frameworks could definitely push things in the right direction. This year we might see a new development on the mobile web, a wave that will take us beyond responsiveness and into the promised land of web apps.
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In this article, Anya Pratskevich will share some ideas about app page design. She’ll also argue that dropping your assumptions and testing is the only way to find content that not only looks and reads great, but also helps your bottom line. The reality is that nobody knows for sure how to design for maximum conversion. What worked in one project will not necessarily work in another. What you can do is test everything: whether it is a different background color for each screenshot (worked in our case) or simply rearranging your current visuals on the page. Design optimization is a dicey game, so roll with it and have fun testing.
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Web applications are highly interactive, dynamic and performant, while websites are informational and less transient. This very rough categorization provides us with a starting point, from which to apply development and design patterns. In this article, Dmitry Nutels will show you examples that will get you to the point of being able to be a better judge of how, in your particular application, a server-side rendering solution should be approached. The evolution steps he’ll go through are hardly comprehensive, especially in the area of data retrieval on the server. There is a lot of additional work being done by tools and frameworks that have been inspired and enabled by React: Redux, Relay, Fluxible, Alt and so many, many more.
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It’s possible to make visually impressive augmented reality projects using just open source libraries. In this tutorial, Martin Sikora will make use of OpenCV in Python to detect circle-shaped objects in a webcam stream and replace them with 3D Earth in Three.js in a browser window while using WebSockets to join this all together. His core idea behind this demo was to use tools that are common on the web and don’t require any prerequisites so anyone can start using them right away. That’s why Martin wanted to use just circle detection and not pattern matching, which would require to print or have some particular real-world object.
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In this article, Shawn Jansepar will guide you through his experience in building an app for Beyond the Rack in which he and his team mix native and web content to create an app that “feels” native. With Beyond the Rack, he set out to build an app in which he could easily ship value to users without sacrificing the experience. By following an approach that puts technology in the back seat, allowing them to use the right technology for the task, they believe they have achieved just that.
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