“Free Time” is an iPhone app that flips your calendar upside down and lets you focus on the free time in your day, instead of all the busy time. In this article, Ben Johnson will show you how it came to be and what his team ultimately learned in the process. Also he’ll give you some advice for when you build your next great idea. This is the story of how limitations led to his biggest success in the App Store — and his biggest failure.
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The reason why app store reviews aren’t as effective as they could be is that they’re a one-way conversation, asking the user to say something positive to everyone else. There should be something better, something more conversational. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will investigate the various tactics of prompting for app reviews and ratings and how to make them better. He’ll also talk about how to ask users for feedback in a way that benefits everyone. Getting feedback on your app is important. How else can people tell you that your app is doing well or poorly?
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As mobile browsers continue to improve, offering new features and enhancing performance, new opportunities like this will arise. It’s always important to question whether you should build a native app or a Web app, and keep in mind the pros and cons of each, especially because the differences in their capabilities are narrowing rapidly. In this article, Nick Jonas and Francis Villanueva Will discuss a few of the biggest challenges here: detecting user activity, achieving performant animations, and building an API integrated with Google Analytics.
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With iOS 7’s new Dynamics API, views can be influenced by gravity, attached to each other with springs, and bounced up against boundaries and each other. We’re used to objects in games feeling real. To get this effect, game designers use a physics engine that treats the elements as bodies in a simulation and that uses Newton’s laws of motion to calculate how they move over time. In using the engine, designers specify an object’s bounciness, its density, the level of gravity, and how things are attached to each other. In iOS 7, Apple made that technology available to UIKit-based apps as well.
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This article is the last in a series of articles covering four ways to develop a mobile application. In previous articles, we covered how to build a tip calculator in native iOS, native Android and PhoneGap. In this article, we’ll look at another cross-platform development tool, Appcelerator Titanium.
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What practical steps can you take to make your brand more approachable for mobile users? While general statistics are useful for demonstrating the value of designing with mobile in mind, they don’t provide the guidance necessary to understand precisely how users will interact with a particular brand on their phone. Google Analytics offers a number of free features for incredibly detailed analysis of mobile activity, with the ability to easily compare to desktop activity.
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This is the third installment in a series covering four ways to develop a mobile application. In previous articles, we examined how to build a native iOS and native Android tip calculator. In this article, Peter Traeg will create a multi-platform solution using PhoneGap. As with the previous articles in this series, all of the code for our application may be obtained from a GitHub repository.
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Transformations are a powerful technique for separating content and presentation in Web applications. Yet, they transformations have failed to gain popularity through XSLT. For this reason, Web developers are liable to think that transformations “don’t apply to me,” even though they work with HTML. Thankfully, new transformation frameworks are on the horizon, that hold the promise of a revival. In this article, Ishan Anand will reintroduce transformations and explore their applications to mobile and responsive design.
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This is the second in a series of four articles covering four ways to develop mobile applications. Today, Peter Traeg will look at how to build the same sort of application using native Android tools. This simple tip calculator contains two screens: a main view and a settings view. The settings view persists the default tip percentage to local storage using Android’s SDK support.
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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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