Mad Libs is a game in which one player prompts others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story, before reading the story aloud. In this article, Tom Hudson will use this game to show you how to build your own action for Google Home. He’s detailed steps to build a custom mad lib action, and He’ll explain why certain steps are important and ultimately how they fit into the voice services world. After this exercise, you will better understand voice services and begin your path to programming actions for Google Home.
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Imagine that you get up to get a glass of water, but the exact reason why you did that at that particular time isn’t easy to explain. It was “too hot” and you were “somewhat thirsty,” but also maybe “a little bored.” Each of these qualities isn’t either/or, but instead fall on a spectrum of values. In contrast, software is usually built on Boolean values. You set isHot to true and if isHot && isThirsty && isBored, then you call getWater(). If you use code like this to control your game characters, then they will appear jerky and less natural. In this article, Lou Franco will show you how to add intelligent behavior to the non-player characters of a game using an alternative to conventional Boolean logic.
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Establishing good navigation is a challenge on mobile due to the limitations of the small screen and the need to prioritize content over chrome. Every navigation patterns suffer from a variety of usability problems. In this article, Nick Babich will examine five basic navigation patterns for mobile apps and describe the strengths and weaknesses of each of them. If you’d like to add some patterns and spice up your designs, you can download and test Adobe XD for free and get started right away.
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Google decided to launch a war against interstitials that ruin the user experience. Any website found guilty of showing intrusive popups, banners or overlays will see its content demoted in Google’s mobile search results. In this article, Myriam Jessier explains what exactly is being penalized, what’s allowed, and some workarounds to help you cope with this new penalty.
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Generally speaking, writing a requirements document is mostly about conveying your vision to the rest of the team. In this article, Eduard Khorkov will outline the most common approaches to writing requirements documents. You will learn the basic steps of writing mobile application requirements and what a good requirements document looks like. Eduard will create two documents: a PDF with user stories and wireframes, and a screen map that complements the PDF. Together, they describe in detail what features the application should have.
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Recent analysis from VoiceLabs estimates that 24.5 million voice-driven devices will be shipped this year, almost four times as many as last year. As experience designers, we now have the opportunity to design voice experiences and interfaces! In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will look at how a typical genie in a bottle works, discuss the steps involved in designing voice experiences, and illustrate these steps by designing a voice app for Alexa.
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Moving from one image for all kinds of devices to the common one-size-per-form-factor approach is definitely a step in the right direction. The downside is that, from a performance perspective, the approach is too general. There is more juice to be squeezed. However, from a development and maintenance perspective, it might make sense because three image sizes, or breakpoints, are manageable. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will look closely at how well the one-size-per-form-factor approach really works and how you can use smart content delivery networks to improve image performance.
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Apple’s GameplayKit has several algorithms and data structures that make it easier to follow game development best practices. When you develop a game, you need to sprinkle conditionals everywhere. If Pac-Man eats a power pill, then ghosts should run away. GKRuleSystem, lets you build up complex conditional logic from smaller pieces. By structuring your code around it, you’ll create rules that are easier to change or reuse for new levels. In this article, we’re going to take typical game logic code and learn how to represent it as a rule system.
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Our industry has exploded with new thinking, patterns and approaches. In this article, Chris Poteet wants to look specifically at the issue of responsive navigation. He will first talk about information architecture, then the purpose of navigation, and finally he will look at three responsive navigation patterns that have served well over time.
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An e-commerce website can’t be 100% compliant with AMP, but there are benefits to adopting the format early on. The mobile search index will enable Google to run its ranking algorithm differently for purely mobile content. This means that mobile content won’t be extracted from desktop content to determine mobile rankings. That’s definitely something that retailers can leverage, thanks to AMP. In this article, Myriam Jessier outlines how to get started with AMP and how to gain an edge over the competition with your e-commerce website.
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