If you are interested in getting started with mobile development and if you like to start with iOS, I bumped into a great resource to learn Swift. There are tons of sample projects and great video walkthroughs as well as source codes of the projects you can download from GitHub.
I had a radical switch to iPad Pro as my primary workspace and I used that set up exclusively for 6 months. As part of my day to day work, I test a lot of features and new developments on our mobile development cycle. I uninstall and re-install and replicate a lot of weird conditions on mobile environments. It’s great to do these and relatively easy to simulate these cases with real devices but when it comes to testing Android, it gets a pretty wide range of devices and hardware/software differences. Often I test the same user behavior on 5-6 devices which is very annoying.
This could be easily me doing testing 🙂
Anyway, I was in search of doing this on the actual mobile device but replicate the other hardware and software variations but in the very cloud, remote-desktop fashion. Why there is no strong service doing this more professionally? Other than testing purposes, I really want to open and want to play with a new android OS on a real device with any resolution I want to and stream that to my existing mobile device? I would love to check out some android apps on my ios device, vice versa…
I gave a try to:
AWS Device Farm – their browser experience is very lagging, starting up a device takes at least 4-5 minutes (why?) and there are most of the time device initialization errors.
appetize.io – so far, the best experience, mobile browser friendly as well, but limited virtual device variations and there is just one real device type.
Genymotion cloud – I haven’t got a chance to play with it since they are in their private beta.
Other option is to build it manually with VPN or RDP but required rooting or jailbreaking the device which is not ideal and painful to go through.
Hopefully, we’ll get there and we’ll have the option to stream apps or OSes as we do movies tv shows today…
I’ve put my efforts on making mfyz.com responsive and mobile compatible last week. After 4 days work, now you are able to access mfyz.com from your tablets and phones (small screen devices).
I’ll write about coding responsive layouts following weeks. There are lots of CSS frameworks that allows you to build responsive layouts but I didn’t use any CSS frameworks when I coded current interface. I could transition to twitter bootstrap but I didn’t see any need to do so. Also the current layout is simple enough to not require any complex structure. Anyway, let’s get back to the subject.
Desktop version (as you can see above) is displayed for 800px and wider screen resolutions. For smaller screens than 800px, interface turns to mobile compatible fluid layout. As you know, fluid layouts are resolution independent because they are fitting the screen they’re in. That’s the reason most of the mobile compatible pages built in fluid layouts.
Tablet devices are usually 800px and wider when they are held landscape, so you will see mfyz.com’s desktop version for landscape orientation on most of the tablets.
Also, most of the tablets have below 800px wide screen resolution for portrait orientation, so the site becomes fluid and mobile compatible version. The mobile compatible version is optimized for better readability and optimized navigation.
If you have an app and you might want to show an app banner when you user visit your page from their mobile safari. For iOS devices, displaying appstore banner is as easy as adding a meta tag to your html page.
How To Implement To Your Website
Add this meta tag to your web page: <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=your_app_id" />
You need your app’s id (a numeric identifier) which you can get it from iTunesConnect interface.
When you add this meta tag to you page, safari handles the rest and shows the banner. In iPad, it also shows some of the screenshots of your app.
