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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In UX design, few things are more intricate than time and personal time management — only a good arsenal of mobile design patterns and information architecture principles can save you. This is the story of redesigning the UX for a popular calenda tool on Android: Business Calendar. We’ll cover designing systems, interaction design problems, scaling across screens and platforms, research, and big business decisions and their outcomes.
Business Calendar started out as a side project, a one-man show, and is now run by a team of eight in Berlin. The app was very successful right from the time Android entered the mainstream market, and it now has an active user base of 2 million. But instead of modernizing the design and usability regularly, the developers focused on implementing user requests and customization options.
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It’s always great to have a little toolbox with just the right tools waiting for you when you need them. What if you are about to start working on a new project which should apply the material design language introduced by Google last year? What if you had just a good starter kit with everything you need to dive into the creative process without being distracted by routine tasks?
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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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Sliders are cool. When they’re done well, customers love to interact with them. When they’re not done well, they can cause a lot of frustration (not to mention lost sales) by standing between your customers and what they want. And getting them wrong is surprisingly easy.
In this article, we will present a solution, including the design and code, for a new type of Android slider to address common problems, along with a downloadable Android mini-app for you to try out. It’s a deep dive into sliders based on a chapter in Android Design Patterns. The experimental inventory-based slider we will look at would be at home in any application that asks for a price, a size, or any other faceted input within a widely distributed range.
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In today’s fast-paced mobile market, consumers have no patience for mobile apps that compromise their experience. “Crashes” and “Not working” are the most common feedback on Google Play for unstable or sluggish apps (including games). lousy apps.
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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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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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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, we’ll create a multi-platform solution using PhoneGap.
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This article is the second in a series of four articles covering four ways to develop mobile applications. The last article covered how to accomplish this using native iOS development tools. In this article, we’ll look at how to build the same sort of application using native Android tools.
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