Category Archives: Mobile

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January 29, 2018

How Much Does It Cost to Build a Mobile App?

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A mobile app is a great way to bring new ideas to life, add value for your customers, or boost awareness of your business—but only if you can build a quality mobile experience without breaking the bank. And nailing down the cost of an app in advance isn’t exactly easy. App development costs can range from trivial to extreme, depending on a host of factors such as what your app does, how users will interact with it, and how you plan to staff the project.

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January 15, 2018

Unmanned Grocery Stores

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Unmanned Grocery Store

These days grocery stores are facing many challenges, like high maintenance costs, price competition with online stores, and limited business hours. All of these issues can be solved with unmanned grocery stores.

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December 7, 2017

Introduction to Mobile Cloud Platforms

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If you are building a mobile application of any sophistication, you are likely to need some services to support your app. You’ll need a way to distribute your app for testing prior to submitting to the app store(s), as well as analytics, error logging, crash reporting, and possibly user and data management services. Of course, you could write these services yourself and provision servers to host these services, but why do that when you don’t have to?

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November 22, 2017

Mobile App Development: Native vs Hybrid

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Your company needs a mobile app and you want to save money (of course). You want the app live last week, and you’d really like to avoid hiring Android and iOS devs on top of your existing web team.

In light of these considerations, going the hybrid route looks like a pretty good option. Hybrid mobile apps promise to be cheaper and faster to develop, and they’re built with tried and true technologies like Javascript, HTML, and CSS. The hybrid sales pitch can be summarized as “one codebase for multiple platforms”. Hybrid platforms include React Native, PhoneGap, Ionic, Titanium, and others.

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November 1, 2017

Computed Properties vs Functions – Why Does It Matter?

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Cookies

What’s your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe? I bet you could ask that question to 5 different people and get 5 totally different recipes… brown sugar vs white sugar, cake flour vs all purpose, dark chocolate vs milk chocolate. All of these recipes result in a chocolate chip cookie but the process by which we get there is a matter of personal preference.  If you were to ask multiple developers to solve a problem, it’s doubtful that any two developers write identical code.  It’s not that any one solution is necessarily better than the others… the resulting code is likely just a matter of personal preference.

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October 16, 2017

Preventing Bloated View Controllers with Coordinators in iOS

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A cartoon image depicting a coordinator pattern.

Overstuffed View Controllers: a problem that is universally despised by iOS developers the world over. Who hasn’t had their eyes glaze over while staring down debugging a 3000 line VC? View Controllers can control so much information, and Apple seems to have very few opinions on where specific logic should go. They give us the decision making power. How can we prevent against this annoying problem and modularize our apps better? Model–View–View Model (MVVM) can certainly help with this, but ultimately leaves routing to View Controllers, which doesn’t make the most sense. This is where a Coordinator comes in.

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March 27, 2017

Meet Kotlin

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Kotlin is a JVM language that hit version 1.0 about a year ago (February 2016).
It is developed by JetBrains, the same people who make my favorite suite of
IDEs. The language itself is open-source under the Apache License 2.0 and is
developed as a community project over at kotlinlang.org. Kotlin is something
that I have become rather excited about over the past year. This post’s goal is
not to teach you Kotlin but to get you excited about it!

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February 12, 2017

REST API Models in Swift

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There are a lot of APIs out there, a lot of networking layers, a lot of abstractions, I’m going to offer just one way to start building Swift models backed by a RESTful API. Out of personal preference, PromiseKit will be used instead of callbacks and ObjectMapper will be used to convert between JSON and Swift objects.

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January 6, 2017

Hottest Social Media Platforms in China

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You might think that Facebook and Twitter are already occupying the social media space world wide,  However, in China they are blocked. When it comes to Social Media Marketing in China, you must use different tones to communicate with your Chinese audience on their own Social Media platforms, such as Weibo (equivalent of Facebook and Twitter in China), especially Sina Weibo, Tencent Qzone (equivalent of Facebook and Twitter in China), Tencent QQ (Instant Message tools), Tencent Wechat (Mobile communication and private social networking app), Renren (equivalent of Facebook in China) and Youku & Tudou (equivalent of YouTube in China).

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December 5, 2016

What is Pixel Density and Why Should You Care?

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Pixel density is the number of pixels per linear physical unit. Measured in pixels per inch (ppi or dpi). Pixel density and resolution are technically the same thing, but often people say “resolution” to mean “pixel count,” a related metric:

count = densityH * width * densityV * height

When other things are held constant:

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