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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If you’ve ever had to move your iPad from one hand to the other just to tap a button you couldn’t reach, then you may have already guessed why we began this study in our UX lab.
Our Mail.Ru Group’s UX lab team carries out many usability studies of our apps for smartphones and tablets. We address users’ needs by introducing features in our products. We carefully test all of the functions to ensure users notice and understand them well. Nevertheless, this was the first time we had looked at the physiological aspect of our app’s usage.
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Cross-OS mobile app development is often excruciating, between the multiple languages, the different expectations from users about interactions and the sheer development time. Our goal was to cut through the typical pains in the app development process and create a three-platform app in four weeks.
We were working with Scripps, an American cable TV media company; their new business development team had been working on concepts for new, rapidly developable (is that a word?) apps. We wanted to prove that app development could be done leanly and agilely by working quickly, eliminating unnecessary clutter, utilizing cross-device user experience similarities and leveraging web views.
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One sunny morning in the summer of 2014, I was sitting in a café having just finished an hour-long call with my remote team. Scheduling that call had been a messy exercise: we live in different time zones and it was hard to find a time that worked for everyone. I wanted to make dealing with time zone differences less painful.
I had some free time on my hands, so I pulled my notebook out and started playing around with an iWatch app idea. Yeah, you read that right — 2014 and iWatch, before a watch had ever been announced.
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Working with text has long been the domain of desktops and notebooks. Yet the screen size, resolution and software of mobile devices have improved in recent years, which has made typing a fairly large amount of text quite achievable.
A number of apps and techniques are intended to make this task easier, thus increasing productivity and increasing the amount of text that can be comfortably created or edited on a mobile device.
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Testing is crucial to ensuring success in the highly competitive landscape of mobile apps and games. But even poorly planned testing can take up 20 to 50% of your total development effort, in which case it would also account for the single biggest cost in your budget. To ensure that testing is extremely efficient, covering the breadth of today’s mobile ecosystems and device models, the best option is an online cloud-based service.
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Are you a web designer or developer who dreams about creating a mobile game and bringing it to the app store? We have good news: Your road to the app store might be shorter than you think! And if you can recall your experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform from days of old, then you’ll even have a shortcut.
Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this article, we will share some insights on how we built a game for iOS that is written entirely in ActionScript.
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“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. Read on to find out how it came to be and what the team ultimately learned in the process.
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When our HTML5 game Numolition was nearly done, we decided to throw it all away and rebuild it in Unity. That turned out to be an exciting and valuable experience, and one that I thought would be worth sharing with other Web developers. Come in, the water’s warm!
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Since a smartphone landed in almost everyone’s pocket, developers have been faced with the question of whether to go with a mobile website or a native app. Native applications offer the smoothest and most feature-rich user experience in almost every case. They have direct access to the GPU, making layer compositions and pixel movements buttery-smooth.
Native applications also provide native UI frameworks that end users are familiar with, and they take care of the low-level aspects of UI development that developers don’t have time to deal with. When eschewing an app in favor of a mobile website, developers often sacrifice user experience, deep native integration and a complex UI in favor of SEO and accessibility.
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