Will the resources spent implementing app indexing for Google search be a boon or a bust for your app’s traffic? If your resources are limited and you’re wondering if app indexing would deliver enough traffic and installations to justify the effort, our experience would suggest you should focus on web content instead. In this article, Bryson Meunier will take you through a case study for app indexing at our company, the results of which may surprise you.
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How exactly does one make a “good” app icon? A beautiful, identifiable and memorable app icon can have a huge impact on the popularity and success of the app. In this article, Michael Flarup has put together some tips and advice to guide you on your way to designing great app icons. He’s been designing, making resources and giving talks about icon design for the past couple of years. In this article, and in the video at the end, he’ll sum up what he’s learned about this amazing craft.
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Have you tried experimenting with the Complications API? Thanks to the Complications API, every Android application can easily export the most important data and make it accessible at a glance directly on the user’s wrist, even without requiring a dedicated watch face. In this article, Daniele Bonaldo shows how to make your app’s data available directly from a wearable watch face, allowing the user to access it at a glance. You’ll also learn how to sync data between a phone and smartwatch, and how to display it using the new Complications API.
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What would Apple gain by letting developers build web apps that don’t need to go in the App Store? Is iOS holding us back? In this article, Stéphanie Walter presents some of the cool things you can do with APIs and other technologies to make your users’ lives easier. The future of the mobile browser is bright, shiny and fun. We can and will be able to build incredibly powerful things with web technologies.
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Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part three of this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will finish up the RainCat game and complete the introduction to SpriteKit.
This is lesson three in your RainCat journey. Today you will learn how to create options for muting sounds; game-quitting option; and a main menu — with buttons
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Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part two of this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will explore the basics of SpriteKit. If you missed out on the previous lesson, you can catch up by getting the code on GitHub. Remember that this tutorial requires Xcode 8 and Swift 3. Today, you will learn how to spawn the cat, spawn food, animate the cat and add sound effects and music. Let’s do it!
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In this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will explore the basics of SpriteKit. He will touch on SKPhysics, collisions, texture management, interactions, sound effects, music, buttons and SKScenes. The aim of this series is to get a good understanding of what goes into making a simple game. You can check in with us later on and use the code as a reference for future projects. I will keep updating the code base with interesting additions and refactoring. To get a taste of what you will be creating, check out the completed project.
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Buttons are a vital element in creating a smooth user experience, so it’s worth paying attention to the best essential practices for them. In this article, Nick Babich will show you the essential items you need to know in order to create effective controls that improve user experience, such as making buttons look like buttons, making the most important button clearly identifiable, or labeling buttons with what they do for users.
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How do you go about designing an app? Michael Flarup brings you an article about just that. A top level, somewhat simplified, and very honest overview of the steps involved in designing an app. This is an account of how most of the apps I work on are born, complete with shameless links to the tools he uses. Now when people think of ‘designing’ something, their thoughts often circle around the visual aspects of a product. Pixel pushing in Photoshop or laying grids in Sketch, but that’s a common misconception. Design, in the context of this article, covers the entire process. It is every deliberate action meant to produce something. The truth is that from the moment you get an idea, you are designing.
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Navigation is generally the vehicle that takes users where they want to go. When you examine the most successful interaction navigation designs of recent years, the clear winners are those who execute fundamentals flawlessly. While thinking outside the box is usually a good idea, there are some rules that you just can’t break. In this post, Nick Babich will help you better understand the principles of good navigation for mobile apps, then show you how it’s done using two popular patterns. The easier your product is for them to use, the more likely they are to use it.
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