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
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
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
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
Mobile application ecosystems — let’s count Android and iOS here — are unbelievably dynamic, but they also suffer from both software and hardware fragmentation. This is especially true for Android, but fragmentation also exists in the iOS ecosystem, as experienced with the rollout of iOS 8. As the latest version of iOS was released, many existing apps were made clumsy on updated devices.
... Read More
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... Read More
