In the tech industry, many of us came of age during hip-hop's rise as a dominant art form. Its spirit of individualism, bravado, and constant reinvention makes it impossible for us not to admire. Our thought leaders craft mixtapes and pour millions of dollars into apps that decode rap lyrics.
The founders of my former company rapped to celebrate every corporate milestone. We’re compelled... Read More
After months of hard work, I’ve finally gotten my side project, Melody Jams, into the App Store. It’s been quite the adventure, and I’m thrilled to see it in the store. Seeing it live makes me reflect on the process that got us there: our failures and successes, some of the crazy stuff we figured out and what our hopes and dreams are.
To give you some context, I worked with five other... Read More
If you’ve ever written an iOS app beyond a trivial "Hello world" app with just one screen and a few views, then you might have noticed that a lot of code seems to "naturally" go into view controllers.
Because view controllers in iOS carry many responsibilities and are closely related to the app screens, a lot of code ends up being written in them because it’s just easier and faster that... Read More
In part 1 of this tutorial we started building our iOS app from scratch. We started out by setting up a blank React Native project. Then we pulled data from the Unsplash.it API. Because downloading data takes time, we built a loading screen.
In the process we went over positioning UI elements with flexbox and styling them using CSS-like properties. Towards the end of part 1 we downloaded... Read More
The idea of building mobile apps with JavaScript is not new. We’ve seen frameworks like Ionic and PhoneGap take on the challenge, and to some extent succeed in gaining a fair amount of developer and community support.
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... Read More
Like many others, I was initially skeptical of Facebook and Instagram's React. Initial demos of React's JavaScript language extension, JSX, made many developers uneasy. For years we had worked to separate HTML and JavaScript, but React seemed to combine them. Many also questioned the need for yet another client-side library in an ocean full of them.
As it turns out, React has proved... Read More
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... Read More
When your design looks beautiful and polished, how do you know if it performs well? While it is easy to predict the appeal of a clean and simple UI, design that converts is always a shot in the dark for marketers and designers.
We worked with the team at FiftyThree to test their app store landing page before they launched ads in China. After tweaking background color, graphics, screenshot... Read More
Web applications are everywhere. There is no official definition, but we’ve made the distinction: 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.
These patterns are often established through a different... Read More
