Building a Mobile App


Book Description

Coding is cool, and these fun projects help you get started today! Building a Mobile App offers basic lessons in Android development, designed specifically for kids! Three fun projects walk you through basic coding skills using MIT's App Inventor—a free, online programming tool that uses a simple block style language that makes coding easy to learn. No long chapters to read, and no homework—just dive right in! You'll begin with a basic project that shows you how to make an app that works; next, you'll put those skills to work on a photo editing app that takes your skills to the next level. Finally, you'll level up one more time to become a Game Maker—that's right, you'll actually build a mobile game that you can send to your friends! Each project includes step-by-step directions and plenty of graphics to help you stay on track, and easy-to-read instructions help you complete each project frustration-free. App building can get pretty complicated, but it doesn't have to start out that way. Start small to pick up the basics quickly, and you'll be coding in no time! This book helps you get started quickly and easily, with a focus on fun. Build your own Android mobile apps using a free online platform! Code everything yourself, including buttons, screens, and interactions! Build an app that lets you draw on pictures you take! Create a simple, interactive game you can share with your friends! Adults all over the world turn to For Dummies books for clear instruction with a sense of humor; the Dummies Junior books bring that same "learning is fun" attitude to kids, with projects designed specifically for a kid's interests, needs, and skill level. Building a Mobile App gets kids coding quickly, with fun projects they'll be happy to show off!




Building Mobile Apps at Scale


Book Description

While there is a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there tends to be less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale. This book collects challenges engineers face when building iOS and Android apps at scale, and common ways to tackle these. By scale, we mean having numbers of users in the millions and being built by large engineering teams. For mobile engineers, this book is a blueprint for modern app engineering approaches. For non-mobile engineers and managers, it is a resource with which to build empathy and appreciation for the complexity of world-class mobile engineering. The book covers iOS and Android mobile app challenges on these dimensions: Challenges due to the unique nature of mobile applications compared to the web, and to the backend. App complexity challenges. How do you deal with increasingly complicated navigation patterns? What about non-deterministic event combinations? How do you localize across several languages, and how do you scale your automated and manual tests? Challenges due to large engineering teams. The larger the mobile team, the more challenging it becomes to ensure a consistent architecture. If your company builds multiple apps, how do you balance not rewriting everything from scratch while moving at a fast pace, over waiting on "centralized" teams? Cross-platform approaches. The tooling to build mobile apps keeps changing. New languages, frameworks, and approaches that all promise to address the pain points of mobile engineering keep appearing. But which approach should you choose? Flutter, React Native, Cordova? Native apps? Reuse business logic written in Kotlin, C#, C++ or other languages? What engineering approaches do "world-class" mobile engineering teams choose in non-functional aspects like code quality, compliance, privacy, compliance, or with experimentation, performance, or app size?




Learning Mobile App Development


Book Description

Now, one book can help you master mobile app development with both market-leading platforms: Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Perfect for both students and professionals, Learning Mobile App Development is the only tutorial with complete parallel coverage of both iOS and Android. With this guide, you can master either platform, or both--and gain a deeper understanding of the issues associated with developing mobile apps. You'll develop an actual working app on both iOS and Android, mastering the entire mobile app development lifecycle, from planning through licensing and distribution. Each tutorial in this book has been carefully designed to support readers with widely varying backgrounds and has been extensively tested in live developer training courses. If you're new to iOS, you'll also find an easy, practical introduction to Objective-C, Apple's native language.




Building Web Apps with WordPress


Book Description

WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. As this practical guide clearly demonstrates, you can use WordPress to build web apps of any type—not mere content sites, but full-blown apps for specific tasks. If you have PHP experience with a smattering of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you’ll learn how to use WordPress plugins and themes to develop fast, scalable, and secure web apps, native mobile apps, web services, and even a network of multiple WordPress sites. The authors use examples from their recently released SchoolPress app to explain concepts and techniques throughout the book. All code examples are available on GitHub. Compare WordPress with traditional app development frameworks Use themes for views, and plugins for backend functionality Get suggestions for choosing WordPress plugins—or build your own Manage user accounts and roles, and access user data Build asynchronous behaviors in your app with jQuery Develop native apps for iOS and Android, using wrappers Incorporate PHP libraries, external APIs, and web service plugins Collect payments through ecommerce and membership plugins Use techniques to speed up and scale your WordPress app




Developing Inclusive Mobile Apps


Book Description

By failing to consider those with needs different to ourselves, we are telling these people they are not welcome in our app, and therefore that technology as a whole, is not for them. This is not hyperbole—23% of people in the US with a registered disability aren't online at all, that's three times more likely than the general population. When asked why they're not online, disabled respondents say their disability prevents them or that using the internet is too hard. To help your apps combat the issue of digital exclusion, this book covers considerations and tools mobile developers, or anyone creating mobile experiences, can use to make mobile work better for those with disabilities—mental or physical—and how to create a better experience for everyone. Software is not made up of cold, unthinking algorithms. Software is a craft in the truest sense of the word, and one of the greatest tools you can have as a craftsperson is empathy for the people who will be using your app. Each one of whom is an individual with different abilities, experiences, knowledge, and circumstances. What You'll Learn Create mobile experiences that work for as many people as possible Incorporate a worldview of accessibility and customer service into your design Work with accessibility tools and techniques commonly available for developers Who This Book Is For Mobile developers working solo or as part of a team. UX designers, quality engineers, product owners, and anybody working in mobile.




Building Apps


Book Description

With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, apps have taken the world by storm and captured the collective imagination. They range in nature from delightfully frivolous and whimsical to sturdily practical and utilitarian, simple and straightforward to dazzlingly elaborate. In an incredibly brief period of time, they have become fundamental to the smooth and pleasurable functioning of most people's daily lives. App designers are the new rock stars of the programming world. Any teen seeking to learn what apps are, how they work, and how they can be designed, programmed, tested, and sold to the highest bidder will find all these questions answered in these pages. This hands-on, how-to resource packed with practical insider information is sure to help launch many of the next great apps soon to be downloaded to mobile devices. Its emphasis on career-building, science, and digital literacy content fully satisfies Reading Anchor Standard 10 of the Common Core Curriculum.




Mastering Shiny


Book Description

Master the Shiny web framework—and take your R skills to a whole new level. By letting you move beyond static reports, Shiny helps you create fully interactive web apps for data analyses. Users will be able to jump between datasets, explore different subsets or facets of the data, run models with parameter values of their choosing, customize visualizations, and much more. Hadley Wickham from RStudio shows data scientists, data analysts, statisticians, and scientific researchers with no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript how to create rich web apps from R. This in-depth guide provides a learning path that you can follow with confidence, as you go from a Shiny beginner to an expert developer who can write large, complex apps that are maintainable and performant. Get started: Discover how the major pieces of a Shiny app fit together Put Shiny in action: Explore Shiny functionality with a focus on code samples, example apps, and useful techniques Master reactivity: Go deep into the theory and practice of reactive programming and examine reactive graph components Apply best practices: Examine useful techniques for making your Shiny apps work well in production




Building Blockchain Apps


Book Description

A Developer's Guide to Blockchain Programming Fundamentals Blockchain development is entering a period of explosive growth, as real applications gain traction throughout multiple industries and cryptocurrencies earn greater acceptance throughout the financial sector. Blockchain represents one of the most promising opportunities for developers to advance and succeed. Building Blockchain Apps is an accessible guide to today’s most advanced and robust blockchain programming models and architectures. Building on his pioneering experience, Michael Juntao Yuan covers a wide range of blockchain application development paradigms. The book starts with a concise introduction to blockchain and smart contract technologies. It then guides you through application development on Ethereum-compatible smart contract platforms. Ethereum is the largest and most robust blockchain ecosystem in the world. Coverage includes Ethereum topics such as tools, application frameworks, internal data structures, external data interfaces, and future roadmap An introduction to new blockchain data protocol based on ElasticSearch, which provides insights into the current state of smart contracts and enables new application designs How to build an application-specific smart contract protocol by modifying and customizing the open source Ethereum Virtual Machine and its programming language tools How to extend and support language features that are most suitable for particular kinds of smart contracts (e.g., smart contracts for e-commerce marketplaces) with the open source Lity project How to customize and change the blockchain consensus layer beneath the application layer via the popular Tendermint and Cosmos SDK frameworks A survey of cryptocurrency and financial topics from the developers’ point of view, providing an analytical framework for valuating cryptocurrencies and explaining the roles of crypto exchanges Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.




Building OpenSocial Apps


Book Description

The Insider’s Guide to Writing OpenSocial Applications for MySpace–and Beyond! When you write OpenSocial applications for MySpace, you can reach millions of users overnight. Building OpenSocial Apps shows you how, one step at a time. Whether you’re building casual widgets or feature-rich, professional applications, this book will teach you everything you need to know. The authors are the leading experts on OpenSocial and MySpace and have personally helped construct the MySpace platform and OpenSocial standards. In this indispensable book, they walk you through the entire process of building apps, from signing up through building complex apps that can scale to thousands of users and interoperate on more than fifty social networks, such as Hi5, Orkut, and LinkedIn. They demonstrate today’s best practices for building OpenSocial applications and present dozens of tips for leveraging both MySpace and OpenSocial to their fullest. Coverage includes Installing and working with the MySpace Developer Platform Retrieving, parsing, and displaying user data, friend lists, and photos Sending App invitations and notifications Building mashups that communicate with third-party web services Marketing your App and building your user base Designing for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance Securing MySpace and OpenSocial apps, and protecting users’ privacy Building apps that display ads and accept micropayments A companion web site (opensocialtictactoe.googlecode.com) includes an extensive library of downloadable source code and other support materials.




Building Progressive Web Apps


Book Description

Move over native apps. New progressive web apps have capabilities that will soon make you obsolete. With this hands-on guide, web developers and business execs will learn how—and why—to develop web apps that take advantage of features that have so far been exclusive to native apps. Features that include fast load times, push notifications, offline access, homescreen shortcuts, and an entirely app-like experience. By leveraging the latest browser APIs, progressive web apps combine all of the benefits of native apps, while avoiding their issues. Throughout the book, author Tal Ater shows you how to improve a simple website for the fictional Gotham Imperial Hotel into a modern progressive web app. Plus: Understand how service workers work, and use them to create sites that launch in an instant, regardless of the user’s internet connection Create full-screen web apps that launch from the phone's homescreen just like native apps Re-engage users with push notifications, even days after they have left your site Embrace offline-first and build web apps that gracefully handle loss of connectivity Explore new UX opportunities and challenges presented by progressive web apps