The Art Of Launching An App: A Case Study Advertisement You’ve made your first app! Now what? Anyone in the app business knows that marketing an app is tough. OK, so we have two apps that have leaped the giant “feature” hurdle and scored attention, much to the envy of countless wannabe developers. (Image credit: florianplag5 The app world is becoming like one giant forest, millions and millions of trees. Many developers fall into the trap of allocating tight budget dollars to quick “tech” fixes in a desperate attempt to lift their app above the crowd. Case Study: David and Goliath According to a recent article in Publishing Perspectives6, “The children’s market is a huge opportunity within the digital publishing arena.” The quality of the work was undeniable, so it was imperative to the developer that the app get attention. Not so fast! Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid From a production standpoint, the David and Goliath for iPad app was ready to launch in July 2011. (Image credit: stevendepolo9) Finding the Perfect Partner Lessons Learned
How To Create A Simple 2D iPhone Game with OpenGL ES 2.0 and GLKit Part 1 This is a blog post by site administrator Ray Wenderlich, an independent software developer and gamer. Create a simple game for iOS - the hardcore way! There are a lot of great tutorials out there on OpenGL ES 2.0, but they usually stop after drawing a rotating cube on the screen. How to take that rotating box and turn it into a full game is usually left as an exercise to the poor reader. That, my friends, is where this tutorial series comes in! I’ve tried to make this tutorial series as similar as possible to the above Cocos2D tutorial so you can compare the two to see the differences in implementation if you are curious. The goal of this tutorial series is to keep things as simple as possible, and walk you through the process step by step. Before reading this tutorial series, I recommend reading the Beginning OpenGL ES 2.0 with GLKit tutorial series. Once you’ve read that, keep reading to make a simple 2D game for the iPhone – the hardcore way! Why OpenGL ES 2.0 and GLKit? Why Use GLKit?
Designing For Mobile - Best Practices for Superior User Experiences Responsive design, UI, UX, rendering, information architecture… if you speak with anyone in the mobile or web space nowadays you will certainly cover the topic of user experience. That’s because the user experience is critical to success on mobile or web, and becoming increasingly important everyday as new devices proliferate the market and people on the move have less patience for poorly designed sites and apps. Regardless of your involvement on a mobile project, a great user experience should be the goal for all of us who work in mobile. That’s because good design ensures end users find what they need and repeat visit – and that just makes good business sense. So how do we fix this? Know Your PurposeThink Small But Don’t Shrink DownConsider All Shapes & SizesBe LightTouchy Feely MechanicsContext in Context 1. In broad strokes the three major benefits mobile will give your business are: Simplicity, Immediacy & Context. 2. 3. This same thinking also applies to tablets. 4. 5. 6.
Quick Usability Checklist Does your site check off all the items mentioned on this Usability Checklist? After reviewing websites for a few months, I’ve begun to see general patterns emerge that make a site more or less usable. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of the more common problems designers should address on their own sites in a Usability checklist of sorts. Not all of these items will apply to every website, these are just suggested things to look for in your own site design. Along the way I’ll share some sites that illustrate different items effectively. 1. Make it abundantly clear to the user what site they are on. A Sites ID is usually found at the top left of a page right next to navigation of some kind. 2. Pages on WordPress.com often have generously sized Page Titles that are hard to miss. Just as with the Site ID, the Name of any page being browsed needs to be made very clear to the user. 3. YouTube has a clear, small primary navigation. 4. Chapter 6, Don’t Make Me Think 5. 6. 7.
Device-Agnostic Approach To Responsive Web Design Advertisement This is a different take on Responsive Web design. This article discusses how we can better embrace what the Web is about by ignoring the big elephant in the room; that is, how we can rely on media queries and breakpoints without any concern for devices. The Challenge Let’s start our journey by looking at these online tools: Those pages let people check websites through a set of pre-built views based on various device sizes or orientations. Now check the-great-tablet-flood of 20116. Do you get my drift? I don’t want to go the "consider it to be harmful7" route, but I want to point out that tools like these, or articles promoting a device approach (i.e. To me, it seems more realistic to check our layouts through viewports of arbitrary dimensions and shapes. The Goal The goal is to surface content, to style boxes as columns so they bring sections above the fold. Content Is King! The Principle The content of a box dictates its width. Decisions are made keeping these points in mind:
NSDateComponents NSDateComponents serves an important role in Foundation's date and time APIs. By itself, it's nothing impressive—just a container for information about a date (its month, year, day of month, week of year, or whether that month is a leap month). However, combined with NSCalendar, NSDateComponents becomes a remarkably convenient interchange format for calendar calculations. Whereas dates represent a particular moment in time, date components depend on which calendar system is being used to represent them. Very often, this will differ wildly from what many of us may be used to with the Gregorian Calendar. Extracting Components From Dates NSDateComponents can be initialized and manipulated manually, but most often, they're extracted from a specified date, using NSCalendar -components:fromDate:: NSCalendar *calendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];NSDate *date = [NSDate date];[calendar components:(NSDayCalendarUnit | NSMonthCalendarUnit) fromDate:date]; Relative Date Calculations
Learn iOS design and Xcode The most efficient design tool just got better Design isn't hard to learn. That's because most of us are already building products and are familiar with what design means. Sketch uses one unit, styles only relevant to UI design, a built-in iPhone previewing tool called Mirror and Artboards, the most efficient way to template multiple screens. Everything is already in vector, so you don't have to worry about designing for multiple devices. It's only been one year since Sketch has completely changed my design workflow. What's new in Sketch 3 Sketch 3 has some of the biggest improvements I've seen in an application. Improved UI Sketch 2 used sub-panes that felt like a drag when you had to edit font styles and background properties. Symbols The team had to rethink about how Symbols could be designed in the context of Sketch. Text Styles Interestingly, this feature is most prevalent in text editors such as Pages and Keynotes. Quick Export to Multiple Resolutions It comes with the iOS 7 UI Kit
A one page guide to HTML5 support in mobile browsers – Cell Phones & Mobile Device Technology News & Updates HTML5 has arrived and holds a lot of promise for the future of web browsing. It does video, it is starting to become a platform for games, and it teases us with the dream of a rich browsing experience without the need for plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. Most mobile browser development teams have now brought their browser software in-line with the requirements of HTML5, meaning they can advertise HTML5 compatibility. However, HTML5 isn’t just one thing, and is actually a collection of over 20 important and useful features. How do you know which browser supports what features? The mobile browsers covered include Safari on iOS, Android Browser, BlackBerry Browser, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, webOS Browser, and Symbian Browser. It’s actually difficult to pick a winning browser, and it depends more on which features are important to you. Read more at Mobile HTML5
User Interface Elements: 2012 UI Kits Collection This year was very productive in terms of UI Kits. There hasn’t been such amount of User Interface Elements published any year, as this year, a kind of a boom of different styles and shapes. I would like to point out our support to the creation of completely new packages of ui elements, let’s say directly: it was a breakthrough in the creation of such interfaces. To be sure (for those who do not know), here you will find free ui kits, and here, a huge collection of paid ui elements. And so, in this article we have compiled the best quality UI Kits, in the first part of this article, you will find free UI Kits, and in the second part of this article, – the best paid UI Kits. We have many times written about why it is good to use UI Kits in your work, with this collection, you will be able to compare the quality of the created packs, and you will decide for yourself why it is necessary to choose the best and more complete packs of web elements. Free UI Kits The Bricks Impressionist UI Free
Separate Mobile Website Vs. Responsive Website Advertisement The US presidential race is heading into full swing, which means we’ll soon see the candidates intensely debate the country’s hot-button issues. While the candidates are busy battling it out, the Web design world is entrenched in its own debate about how to address the mobile Web: creating separate mobile websites versus creating responsive websites. It just so happens that the two US presidential candidates have chosen different mobile strategies for their official websites. In the red corner is Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s dedicated mobile website, and in the blue corner is incumbent Barack Obama’s responsive website. We’re going to see how well their mobile Web experiences stack up. Why Bother With Mobile? Why are the candidates attempting to create mobile-optimized Web experiences? What’s more is that people are arriving to the mobile Web through more diverse channels than ever before. These are just a few channels that drive people to the Web on mobile devices. (al)
The 10 rules of a Zen programmer On a rainy morning I found myself sitting on the desk thinking about efficient working. Before I started as a freelancer I had some days were I worked lots but could look only back on a worse outcome. I started with Zen practice back in 2006. What clearly came to my mind before a good while was: the old Zenmasters already knew before hundreds of years, how today programmers should work. Even when I don’t like these “be a better programmer” posts, I want to outline some of my thoughts from that morning. 1. If you have decided to work on a task, do it as well as you can. Kodo Sawaki says: if you need to sleep, sleep. 2. Before you work on your software, you need to clean up your memory. Something exciting on the mailing list? Think like this: at most times your mind is pretty clean when you wake up at the morning. You know it already. 3. Remember the days were you were a beginner. Was there ever a software build twice, the same way? 4. Some programmers have a huge problem: their own ego.
How to Build an App Empire: Can You Create The Next Instagram? No Comments Chad Mureta runs his seven-figure app business from his iPhone. (Photo: Jorge Quinteros). I first met Chad Mureta in Napa Valley in 2011. Two years prior, he had been in a horrible car accident. He’d lost control of his truck in at attempt to avoid a deer, hit a median, and flipped four times, nearly destroying his dominant arm in the wreckage. While in the hospital for a lengthy recovery, a friend gave him an article about the app market. “In just over two years, I’ve created and sold three app companies that have generated millions in revenue. After finishing rehab, Chad was able to leave his real estate company, where he’d been working 70 hours a week, to run his app business from his iPhone… in less than 5 hours per week. “Apps” are the new, new thing, thanks to major successes like Draw Something (bought by Zynga for $210 million) and Instagram (bought by Facebook for $1 billion), among others. Last but not least, don’t miss the competition at the end. Enter Chad Mureta
How can retailers appeal to mobile users in store? The use of mobile phones for offline shopping has increased dramatically over the past few years, and even if consumers aren’t actually making a purchase with their mobiles, they are often using them to research products and prices while shopping. According to a recent Toluna / Econsultancy survey of UK consumers, 13% of respondents had made a purchase on their mobiles, and 19% had used them to compare prices and look at product reviews while out shopping. So what can retailers do to adapt to this challenge? A recent Motorola survey in the US found that customers have good reason to compare prices on their mobiles. 43% of respondents said the mobile improved their offline shopping experience, while 87% of retailers said that customers would be able to find a better deal by using their phones. Using the barcode scanner on the Amazon app, or entering a search term, customers can easily check the products they are looking at in a store on Amazon’s site. Price match promises Voucher codes
Ten Things To Think About When Designing Your iPad App Advertisement Like most well-designed things, the magic of an iPad app comes from a union of usefulness, usability and meaning. Games aside, the app must be useful by solving a problem that people actually have through the right set of functionality at the right time. It must be easy to use and, just as importantly, easy to get started using, without a lot of pesky setup and learning steps. And it must hold meaning for the user through visual beauty, an emotional connection, personal insights, etc. We’ve excluded tips that have already been mentioned in every single iPad design article ever written (such as, “Invite users to touch by presenting real-world metaphors in a skeuomorphic interface” —look it up!). Take A Goal-Oriented Approach To Simplify Functionality. Good iPad apps are about simplicity and doing a few things well. For example, Epicurious does an excellent job of giving the multi-tasking cook exactly what they need. Think About The Place Of Use. Huffington Post: top right.