Learn mobile app development with these 10 online courses

Learn mobile app development with these 10 online courses

Hardik Gandhi   January 12, 2018

Top 10 online courses to help your learn mobile app development plus some advice from the experts on why app prototyping makes all the difference!

Thinking about becoming a Mobile App Developer? You’re in luck! There’s never been a better time to learn mobile app development. Take a look:

• The market for apps is soaring. Apple’s App Store and Google Play global downloads reached nearly 26 billion and global mobile app revenue was estimated at $77 billion in 2017.
• App Developers are some of the hottest prospects on the current job scene, with the average Senior Mobile App Developer in the US on $80,013/year.
• Looking ahead, the app business is expected to do even better, with global mobile app revenue forecast for 2020 at $189 billion.

For budding developers, it’s time to hop aboard the gravy train. But what’s the first step in learning mobile app development? What courses should you sign up for? Should you teach yourself app development? We’ve got you covered.

And yes, the first step is learning how to prototype a mobile app. Learn why here — plus get our top 10 online courses on mobile app development to get you started right away, no matter where you are!

10 free and paid online courses to help you learn mobile app development

Here are our top 10 online courses to help you learn mobile app development:

1 — Android Development Tips Weekly series on Lynda

Teach yourself app development with this series of Android development tips by David Gassner.

Each week, David shares techniques to help you speed up your coding, improve app functionality or make your apps more reliable and refined.

The tutorials cover developing the app’s user interface, backend processing and open source libraries, to get your coding knowledge off the ground even quicker.

• Level: Beginner — Intermediate
• Commitment: approximately 3h per video
• Price-point: 30-day free trial, from $19.99 thereafter

2 — Mobile App Development for Beginners on Udemy

Dee Aliyu Odumosu’s mobile app development course is ideal if you’re looking to break into iOS.

Learn how to create and customize 10+ iPhone apps (using Swift 3 and Xcode 8) with easy step-by-step instructions. The course begins with implementation of basic elements — UILabel, UIButton, UITextField etc. — Auto Layout and multiple-sized icons, with more advanced classes covering memory issues, storyboarding and displaying rich local notifications.

Note that this course requires you to own and already be familiar with Mac.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: approximately 33 hours
• Price-point: $10.99 (New Year discount, was $50.00)

3 — iOS App Development with Swift Specialization on Coursera

This is the ultimate Swift for iOS development course, brought to you by Parham Aarabi and the University of Toronto.

Using XCode, Parham will teach you how to design elegant interactions and create fully functioning iOS apps, such as the photo editing app for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The course also includes best practices to help you become proficient in functional Swift concepts.

Note that this course requires you to own and already be familiar with Mac.

• Level: Intermediate (some previous experience required)
• Commitment: 6 weeks
• Price-point: 7-day free trial, $49 per month thereafter

4 — Introduction to Mobile Application Development using Android on edX

Learn mobile app development and the basics of Android Studio in Jogesh K Muppala’s introduction to the Android platform.

In this 5-week course, you’ll explore the basics of Android application components as well as Activities and their lifecycle, some UI design principles, Multimedia, 2D graphics and networking support for Android.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 6 weeks
• Price-point: free

5 — Full Stack Web and Multiplatform Mobile App Development Specialization on Coursera

If you’re learning mobile application development for Android and found the above course useful, try this course out next.

Here you’ll have the chance to build complete web and hybrid mobile solutions, as well as master front-end web, hybrid mobile app and server-side development.

• Level: Intermediate (some previous experience required)
• Commitment: approximately 20 weeks
• Price-point: 7-day free trial, $39 per month thereafter

6 — iOS 9 and Swift 2: From Beginner to Paid Professional on Skillshare

Mark Price’s online course for iOS Swift is everything you need to know about iOS 9 development.

This is another great set of classes for novice iOS coders. Build 15+ apps for iOS 9, learn swift 2.0 and publish apps to the App Store. Warmups, class projects and exercises will help you keep on top of the workload.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: approximately 37 hours
• Price-point: from $15 a month

7 — The iOS Development Course That Gets You Hired on Career Foundry

Jeffrey Camealy presents the iOS Development course to get your hired.

1-on-1 mentorship from industry experts and real-world projects complement a set of 6 structured modules. The course covers the very basic principles of iOS development and takes you right to the point of submitting an app to the App Store.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 6 months
• Price-point: $4000 (payment plans available)

8 — Get Started With React Native on TutsPlus

Markus Mühlberger’s course for React Native is perfect for anyone who wants to code for multiple mobile platforms.

Learn how to create and customize UI elements, build user interaction, and integrate third-party components into apps for both iOS and Android. Upon completion, you’ll be able to write mobile apps in React Native.

• Level: Intermediate
• Commitment: 1.2 hours
• Price-point: $29 a month

9 — Build a Simple Android App with Java on Treehouse

Ben Deitch’s course will help you build simple mobile apps for Android with Java, without any prior knowledge.

Best-suited to budding Android developers, this course will explore programming in Android and some very basic concepts of the Android SDK. By the end of the course, you’ll have a working knowledge of how a basic app works.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 1.5 hours
• Price-point: from $25 a month

10 — Try iOS on Code School

Gregg Pollack’s tutorials on iOS app development from the ground up and requires only basic coding experience.

Write your first iPhone app code and learn about different UI elements, such as buttons, labels, tabs and images. Upon completion, you’ll be able to connect to the internet to fetch data, build out table views and navigate between different areas of your app.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 6–8 hours
• Price-point: $29 a month

It’s an exciting time for mobile app developers. And as you can see, there are plenty of resources out there to help get your career off the ground. But don’t forget to look at the big picture.

Prototyping is an integral part of the mobile app life cycle. Download Justinmind now and explore a prototyping tool that’s made with the entire product team in mind.

How to Lead High-Impact, Cross-Functional Projects

How to Lead High-Impact, Cross-Functional Projects

Hardik Gandhi   January 11, 2018

Even When You’re Not the Boss

This past summer I managed the largest acquisition campaign in my company’s history. I work at HubSpot, a marketing software company that popularized lead-gen campaigns and the whole idea of “inbound marketing,” so this is no small feat (we’ve run massive campaigns over the years).

The campaign, Four Days of Facebook, drove 10x the number of average leads of a typical acquisition campaign and 6x the lifetime value of projected customers.

But I didn’t do it alone. This campaign involved 11 teams and 33 people who directly contributed to the work.

Cross-functional campaigns like this can be big, complicated, and challenging which is why they so often take a boss or recognized leader to make them happen. So I wanted to share my experience as a “non-boss.” I hope it encourages other individual contributors out there to get their co-workers in other departments excited about working on high-impact, cross-functional projects.

Pre-planning: create alignment

You won’t have all the answers on day one, but make sure every conversation you’re having at this stage focuses on one thing: impact. You’ll be asking a lot of people to work hard on something outside of their normal day-to-day, make it clear that your asks will translate into business results.

• Meet with senior leaders of each team before you ask for their employees commitment on helping. Again, make it clear that you won’t be wasting anyone’s time, you’re out to generate big results.
• Have a kickoff meeting with the team who will be responsible for delivering the work. At a high-level, you want to let everyone know that you have senior leadership buy-in and the project will be worth their time. On a more tactical level, you’ll also want to get people up-to-speed on the tools you’ll be using to manage the project.
• Go the extra mile to develop a team culture for your team. You know how developers name their projects crazy-sounding names? It’s surprisingly effective! Give your temporary team a name that makes people feel like they’re a part of something, set up an email alias, and create a Slack channel. Get people excited!

Throughout the pre-planning stage, keep your vision front and center. For Four Days of Facebook we were partnering with Facebook, a fact I repeated constantly.

If people are excited and engaged with your vision, they’ll put up with the inevitable bumps as you achieve lift-off.

During: maintain momentum

The Progress Principle is the idea that humans love the satisfaction of wins, even if they’re small. It’s your best friend as you seek to keep multiple teams and dozens of people aligned and moving in the right direction–constantly show (and celebrate) forward progress.

• Display it: I put together a registration goal waterfall chart that was updated everyday to show progress. It’s motivating to close-in on and cross that goal line.
• Never shut up about it: I linked to information about this campaign in my email signature, Slack rooms, wherever I had the attention of my co-workers. And that information was short, sweet, and up-to-date.
• Be a good partner: You’re not technically the manager of the people on a cross-functional team, but you should implement some management best practices: give people autonomy, figure out how they like to work and what kind of support they need from you.
• Ask for feedback: I asked questions constantly– Is this system or process working for you? Can I set up these reports in an easier way? At one point during this campaign I asked the senior manager of a few folks working on the project if she had thoughts on how I could run it better, she told me she would love to see weekly updates sent to her and other senior managers. I was avoiding this as I didn’t want to clutter inboxes, but it ended up being one of my best tools for building internal momentum around the campaign.

Don’t overlook the fundamentals of good project management. A framework like DARCI makes roles & responsibilities super easy so you the project lead can just say, “This meeting is for people who are Responsible and Accountable only, we’ll be covering deadlines for next week”, or “This meeting is for people that need to be Informed, it’ll be a milestone check-in.”

Find a project management framework, and stick to it.

Wrapping up: close-the-loop

I run 4–5 acquisition campaigns at HubSpot every quarter and running a campaign of this size and impact was a complete rush and I can’t wait to do it again. But before jumping into the next big project, it’s important to do a clean wrap-up, I want people to be excited to work with me and my team again in the future.

• Say thank you: Do it publicly via a company announcement or email, and privately. I wrote handwritten notes to every person who contributed to this campaign.
• Share results soon: Share the quantitative results, but don’t miss Twitter comments from attendees, feedback from partners, or the accolades of your co-workers. This is your chance to make it clear that you promised impact and delivered it.
• Look for improvement opportunities: Because no matter how successful your campaign was, there are opportunities to do better — Were any deadlines missed? Why? Did any team members not work well together? Can this be addressed?

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of executing one marketing campaign after the next, and it’s scary to think about leading a big cross-functional project that could potentially fail publicly.

But so often the answer to higher impact is better collaboration. Learning how to lead across teams 10x’ed the impact I was having at my company, I hope it does the same for you.

The Video Game Experience

The Video Game Experience

Hardik Gandhi   January 09, 2018

 

Table of Contents:

1. Top Three & Honourable Mentions
2. First Person & Third Person
3. Roleplaying & Strategy and Tactics
4. Independent & Virtual Reality

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Independent

Best: Rumu

Rumu is a very unique game, and of all the games on this list, I think it’s the one that has the most unique UI. This is most likely due to the fact that Rumu has pioneered the ‘Sentient Vaccuum Cleaner’ genre, and there’s simply no game similar enough to pull inspiration from. Because of this, I’ll briefly summarise the elements I liked the most, so you have an idea of what I’m talking about.

It’s fitting, then, that Rumu’s UI pulls from a number of different genres and also remains quite unique. Rumu (The titular vacuum cleaner himself) has a radial menu to manage it’s quest log and inventory. That’s about where the traditional UI ends, and you start to see some bespoke elements.

Tutorial tips for controls appear outside the environments. This is a nice detail, as it serves not only to communicate the key bind but also as a hint of what you’re supposed to do in any given space.

A similar method is used for doorways or vent spaces — each is earmarked with text or iconography to indicate whether the player can pass through. The difference is actually really important, because it serves to split how the player treats information throughout the game — if the information is inside the room, it’s something to be learned. If it exists outside of the game space, it’s something that little Rumu already knows.

There’s a ‘Datavision’ function that allows Rumu to see how the various smart devices and intractable objects connect. It’s a great way to declutter the environments when the player is being task oriented, and it also often hides hidden easter eggs or gadgets.

One of the smartest UX features of Rumu is how it uses it’s palette and art style to generate emotion. A clean, white kitchen feels calm and simple, while crawling through vents on a sinister dark background gives the game a sense of urgency and danger.

Rumu is beautiful, functional, unique, and incredibly evocative. It’s UX blends perfectly with the narrative of the game, and aids in the storytelling.

Conclusion:
Independent developers are constantly coming up with new, interesting ways to interact with their games. There’s even a few on this list: Hand of Fate 2 and Tooth of Tail both innovate in a well-trodden genre.

Rumu’s a little different, because the robot vacuum cleaner genre isn’t quite as mature as, say, first person shooters. Despite this, the interactions in Rumu feel natural; the spacial and diagetic elements are what I’d expect a robo-vacuum to see in the world, and the meta UI tips help move the player along without breaking the (sometimes literal) fourth wall.

I look forward to seeing the robot vacuum cleaner genre evolve.

Worst: Stationeers

Picking this game sparked an internal debate in my mind over having a ‘Worst’ section at all, but in the end I decided it’s always better to get your feelings out than internalise them.

I really enjoyed Stationeers; I played almost six hours straight in my first run through. It’s an incredibly complex space space station construction game. Most of it’s UI is inoffensive: a simple HUD with your vitals and atmosphere stats, and a slot-based inventory system.

It all falls apart for me in the item management. Rather than go into specifics, I’ll give you an example: I need to take the empty battery out of my welding torch, and replace it with a full one.

I have to press 5 to open my tool belt, use the scroll wheel to highlight the torch, press F to put it in my hand, press R to open the torch’s inventory, press E to change hands, press F to move the batter into my free hand.

Now I press 2 to open my suit inventory, scroll wheel to an empty slot, press F to place the flat batter in there. Scroll wheel to the full battery, press F to place it in my off hand. Press E to change hands. Press R to open the torch inventory. Press E to change hands. Press F to place the battery in.

That’s…15 key presses. I can see what they were going for with this system, but there’s got to be a better way.

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Virtual Reality

Best: Lone Echo

If UX as a practice is still in it’s infancy, UX for VR is a single-celled organism attempting mitosis for the first time. Nobody really has any idea what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, and so many games have great executions with a poor UX.

Lone Echo feels like someone looking at what VR will be doing five years from now, and dragged it screaming back into 2017. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Lone Echo’s UX will help define the future of virtual and augmented reality interfaces.

There’s no HUD in Lone Echo, instead opting to have your UI displayed from various arm-mounted gadgetry. Jack, the player character, has a number of controls and panels along his suit, each of which the player can interact with to reveal various elements interfaces.

This actually annoyed me at first — I wasn’t sure why a robot need any sort of interface at all. However, the interactions available are just so neat and genuinely enjoyable, it becomes a very small nitpick. You will also witness other characters in the game use the same interface, which gives some internal consistency to the game.

Talking to someone, for example, is a matter of simply looking at them and tapping a button the controller. This spawns a list of dialogue options that you select with your finger. It’s a simple thing, but being able to quickly interact with the object your looking at feels great.

Any panels you summon are intractable with your hand. You can scroll and tap like you would on an iPad. It feels completely natural to work with, and there were very few times after the opening minutes where I had trouble with this interaction style.

Similarly, Jack’s wrist holds a number of functions and features that are activated using your opposite hand. Slide across your forearm to open your objectives. Tap the top of your wrist for your scanner, or the side of your wrist for your welder. The interactions are so second-nature after having used them a few times that I found myself not even looking at my hands as I did these simple tasks.

Most of what you see in Lone Echo comes from somewhere. The locomotion, the dialogues, the tool interactions, are all borrowed from games that have come before it. Lone Echo proves that these interactions are unequivocally the right way to do them, and if done right, can be so immersive and intuitive that the player doesn’t have to remember them, they just become the way things are done.

Just like the brilliant writing and slick graphics, Lone Echo’s UX is the reason it’s such a successful game. It keeps the player completely immersed in everything they’re doing, no matter how complex the task. At it’s best, the interactions in Lone Echo are actually fun to use. Menus that are fun! If that’s not a revolution, I don’t know what is.

Conclusion:
The most immersive experience I’ve ever had in a video game. Lone Echo bends over backwards to put you in the moment with objects that behave like the user expects they should, and an environment that is consistently interactive.

Lone Echo isn’t held back by trying to fit it’s UI into it’s narrative — it’s built it’s entire user experience around the narrative, instead. Lone Echo sets the standard for VR UX to come.

Worst: None

It’s a cop out, I know. Truth be told, I haven’t played a VR game that released in 2017 that had any truly awful UX. There’s plenty of games that make some missteps, or the occasional obvious error, but this is going to happen with a still-growing genre like virtual reality. For now, VR gets a pass.

If you got this far, thanks for reading! Hopefully you found something interesting in my choices. Please feel free to comment with your opinions, especially if there’s something great that I missed.

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Who owns the internet?

Who owns the internet?

Hardik Gandhi   January 09, 2018

Six perspectives on net neutrality

This week, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on the future of net neutrality. Whether you’ve been following the political back and forth, skimming the headlines, or struggling to decode acronyms, the decision will have an impact on what we can do online (and who can afford to do it). Because the internet has effectively been free and open since the day it was born, it’s easy to lose sight of the impact this vote will have.

The reality is, the internet is a fragile thing. Open, crazy, weird spaces where people swap stories and secrets, create rad digital art projects, type furiously and freely with people seven time zones away — these spaces are rare. People build them, people sustain them, and now, people are trying to restrict them. If this week’s vote passes — which is looking increasingly likely — the internet’s gatekeepers will have more control over their gates than ever before.

Because we live and breathe the internet, laugh and cry on the internet, connect with people who’ve tangibly changed our lives on the internet, we decided to gather some perspectives on this moment in time. Why it matters, how we got here, and what the future may hold. Here are some of the most insightful essays we’ve found on Medium to help us make sense of the fight to keep the net wild and free.

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In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now, he’s defending it. “I want an internet where consumers decide what succeeds online, and where ISPs focus on providing the best connectivity,” Berners-Lee emphasizes. Content and connectivity are two distinct markets, and they must remain separate. Conflating them risks blocking innovation, free expression, and the kind of creativity that can only thrive online.

What’s happening now is not just about net neutrality, law professor Lawrence Lessig argues, but about the foundations of our democracy. Tracing the history of the concept from its origins in the aughts (one of his students, Tim Wu, coined the term “net neutrality”), Lessig sees the rollback of Obama-era regulations as a symptom of a larger issue: a democracy that doesn’t serve its people.

Through statistical analysis and natural language processing, data scientist Jeff Kao shows that millions of pro-repeal comments submitted to the FCC were faked. Organic public comments, according to Kao’s analysis, overwhelmingly supported preserving existing regulations. The report calls into question the legitimacy of the FCC’s comment process, and the basis of chairman Pai’s intention to roll back regulations.

In part one of a five-part series on net neutrality, computer scientist Tyler Elliot Bettilyon takes us back to FDR’s New Deal. Piecing together the history of “common carrier” laws — those that govern everything from shipping to telephone lines — Bettilyon contextualizes today’s fight for a free and open internet.

Social psychologist E Price interrogates the idea that the internet we’ve grown to love is really as “free and open” as we’d like to think. “Internet activity is already deeply centralized,” Erika writes, and major social media sites are today’s answer to the Big Three TV networks of a few decades ago. The internet is closer to cable than we think, and it’s (probably) about to get even closer.

Why should the internet be a public utility? Economist umair haque debunks the “competition will lower prices” argument against internet regulation, and makes a compelling case for why going online, “just like water, energy, and sanitation,” should be a basic right: “It dramatically elevates our quality of life, best and truest when we all have free and equal access to it.”

Visit battleforthenet to write or call your congressperson in advance of the vote. You can also text a few words of your choice to Resistbot.

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All you need to know about Progressive Web App

All you need to know about Progressive Web App

Hardik Gandhi   January 07, 2018

The officially unofficial PWA logo

By now you must have heard this buzz word called “ Progressive Web App ”. Let me give you a simple definition about PWAs.

Progressive Web Apps are Web Apps which combines the best features of Web and Native Apps. It is progressive because it is constantly progressing.

Why Progressive Web Apps?

Now let’s talk about the “WHY”. Why Frances Berriman and Alex Russell came up with a concept called Progressive Web Apps? Before that let’s understand what problems does it solve.

Problems with Native Apps?

We all have used Android or iOS apps on our smartphones. We use them for all kinds of thing. But while installing any Android/iOS apps we go through these problems :

1. Is this app worth downloading?
2. Do I have enough space?
3. My available data is not sufficient.

One recent survey shows that people are turning away from Android/iOS apps, because not all app experiences are satisfying or worthwhile. Some people simply don’t want any more apps on their phone, some even hesitate to download any app.

If you take a look at the apps installed on your mobile right now there might be at least a dozen apps that you do not use regularly. Sometimes apps only works good when the phone has an active internet connection.

The irony is that most of the apps have a fully responsive website performing the same functions. So why waste your precious disk space and your internet data on your smartphone by installing the native app? The average size of apps that we install from play store/app stores would range from 30–200MB. Moreover, these app needs to updated every week! But Progressive Web Apps are within some KBs and are automatically updated. Thanks to service worker. 🙂

What if a website can do that and much more than a Native app? This is what Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are trying to accomplish.

In short, Progressive web apps combine everything that is great about a native mobile application with everything that is great about a mobile website.

Some other ways I like to describe them:

“The best of the web, plus the best of native apps”

Or, in Alex’s words:

“Just websites that took all the right vitamins”

Features of PWAs:

• Progressive — The word progressive means it works for every user, regardless of browser choice because they’re built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet.
• Responsive — Automatically adjustable to any form: desktop, mobile, tablet etc.
• Load Time — Progressive Web Apps are instantly available
• App-like — Feels like a mobile app with app-style interactions since it’s built on the app shell model.
• Fresh — Always up-to-date so you do not need to update it again and again like any other Android/iOS apps.
• Safe — Served via HTTPS to ensure content is securely delivered
• Engaging — Features like push notifications, etc. makes it very engaging.
• Installable — Allows users to install the website as an app on their home screen without the taking user to an app store.
• Linkable — Easily shared via a URL and do not require complex installation.

Benefits of making a Progressive Web App rather than building a fully functional Android App?

• Cost Effective  — For an app publisher, the biggest advantage is the cost saving in terms of app development and maintenance. Because it is assumed that making a website is lot more easier than making a Android App.
• Cross Platform— Unlike any other apps, Progressive Web Apps are not restricted to any specific platform. That means you do not need to develop separate versions of app for different platforms.

10 REASONS PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS WILL BE THE FUTURE OF APPS

10 Reasons Progressive Web Apps Will Be the Future of Apps
When mobile first started out, websites had to create separate mobile websites which had less content than their…torquemag.io

Some Popular Companies that Do Progressive Web Apps

• Ola
• Flipkart
• pinterest
• Twitter
• Alibaba
• BookMyShow
• MakeMyTrip
• OLX
• The Weather Channel
• Forbes
• JioCinema
• Trivago

Introducing Flipkart Lite — The progressive mobile web app

Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce site, decided to combine their web presence and native app into a Progressive Web Application that has resulted in a 70% increase in conversions. Flipkart’s PWA takes merely 100KB to download, is 100 times smaller than the 10MB Android app and 300 times smaller than the iOS app. Repeat visits take less than 10KB to download.

How to use a Progressive Web App?

Probably, you must be wondering how to use a Progressive Web App! Well, you can just click on any links mentioned above. But provided that you must be using a smart phone in order to install it your own device.

Now let’s click open Flipkart in chrome. ( You must be using a Mobile Device ). Below are some screenshots which demonstrates the installation of a PWA.

Chrome Dev Summit Announcments:

Progressive Web Apps: Great Experiences Everywhere (Google I/O ‘17)

Update: At Chrome Dev Summit, Google also shared a preview of PWA functionality coming to the standard desktop Chrome browser in 2018!

Microsoft is supporting Google’s Progressive Web Apps platform and that’s great news for everyone.

Microsoft recently announced that Progressive Web Apps (PWA) will soon be supported by the Microsoft Edge web browser. Moreover, a few apps hitting the Windows Store — like Slack and Trello — are now mixing PWA with Electron and elements of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

Microsoft is supporting Google's Progressive Web Apps platform and that's great news for everyone
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are an increasingly important piece of the app puzzle. But it's not just Microsoft pushing…www.windowscentral.com