Welcome to the world of mobile development, a world where former giants stumble and new stars are seemingly born on a regular basis. The focus of this book is on developing mobile apps, which encompasses a number of phases including: planning and specification, prototyping and design, implementation, internal testing and deployment, deployment to an app store, discovery by users, installation, use and feedback. Ultimately, we want our users to enjoy using our apps and to give us positive ratings to encourage other users to do likewise. Keep reading to learn how to develop apps for the major platforms. Should this be the first time that you have consid ered getting involved, we advise against delay. The world is moving rapidly towards mobile becoming the predominant form of computing and others will surely overtake you if you wait too long. While developing mobile apps shares many common feature with developing other software, it has specific characteristics. We will cover some of these next.
14th edition Don’t Panic MOBILE DEVELOPER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY Enough Software GmbH + Co. KG Stavendamm 22 28195 Bremen Germany www.enough.de Please send your feedback, questions or sponsorship requests to: mdgg@enough.de Follow us on Twitter: @enoughsoftware Services and Tools for All Mobile Platforms published by: 14th Edition February 2014 This Developer Guide is licensed under the Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved License. Art Direction and Design by Andrej Balaz (Enough Software) Editors: Richard Bloor Marco Tabor (Enough Software) 3 Mobile Developer’s Guide Contents I Prologue 1 The Galaxy of Mobile: An Introduction 12 Conceptional Design for Mobile 22 Android 37 BlackBerry Java Apps 44 BlackBerry 10 56 Firefox OS 62 iOS 74 Java ME (J2ME) 84 Tizen 88 Windows Phone & Windows RT 100 Going Cross-Platform 116 Mobile Sites & Web Technologies 130 Accessibility 140 Enterprise Apps: Strategy And Development 150 Mobile Analytics 158 Implementing Rich Media 164 Implementing Location-Based Services 172 Near Field Communication (NFC) 180 Implementing Haptic Vibration 188 Implementing Augmented Reality 200 Application Security 211 Testing 227 Monetization 241 Epilogue 242 About the Authors 4 I Prologue When we started Enough Software in 2005, almost no one amongst our friends and families understood what we were actually doing. Although mobile phones were everywhere and SMS widely used, apps were still a niche phenomena – heck, even the name ‘apps’ was lacking – we called them MIDlets or “mobile applications” at the time. We kept on architecting, designing and developing apps for our customers – and it has been quite a few interesting years since then: old platforms faded, new platforms were born and a selected few took over the world by storm. Overall: the mobile ecosystem really kicked ass. With the Mobile Developers Guide to the Galaxy, we began to follow this ecosystem closely. Thanks to our contributing authors, this guide now covers a whopping eight mobile platforms, even after dropping some platforms such as Symbian or webOS along the way. This is the rst edition in which we cover Tizen, by the way. This edition is the biggest thus far, with over 10,000 copies printed on rst press – and without our sponsors, this guide would not come to be. Thanks to Paypal – do visit developers.paypal.com to join one of their many great offer- ings! And thanks to SAP, please nd out more regarding their (great!) mobile platform offerings on developers.sap.com. Of course we are especially happy to welcome Twilio as a rst-time sponsor for this edition. Check out www.twilio.com to nd out how their tools can help you with everything from app distribu- tion, improving security through 2 factor authentication, to implementing VoIP and messaging features into your apps. Prologue The future is exciting, we look forward to your sharing your excitement with us via twitter @enoughsoftware or via email: mdgg@enough.de. We are looking forward to hearing from you! Robert + Marco / Enough Software Bremen, February 2014 [...]... way to start as you do not need to spend time learning new software Drawings are easier to change and scrap It is also a lot of fun to make them The advantage of using dedicated applications is the ability to collaborate on your designs and transform your mockups into clickable prototypes Prototyping A prototype is the best way to visualize and evaluate your app’s interactions It does not matter whether... runs for the most part on your server but you can access various phone features on the device with JavaScript, for example to store data locally or to request the current location of the device In contrast to apps, mobile websites are inherently cross-platform However you should not assume that a mobile browser is always based on WebKit, see Microsoft's plea to mobile web developers not to make their... clickable prototype that you can update fairly quickly Ask few people to do certain tasks using your prototype If the app you are designing is a music player you can ask them to play a song If you are unsure of certain functionality you can try to divert the user’s attention by asking them to perform reversed tasks, like changing the selected track and picking another one instead To get the most honest... debugger to a process running in the emulator Beyond that, ddms is the only way (without root-access) to create screenshots in Android versions below 4.0 These four tools along with many others, including tools to analyze method trace logs, inspect layouts and test apps with random events, can be found in the tools directory of the SDK IDE plug-ins are available to help manage all these files Android 27 Version... and libraries to design a prototype that looks and acts similar to the final product You do not need to complete the whole prototype before you start coding Depending on how you choose to organise your work you can focus on certain parts of your app as you go along and even move towards fast iterations in the actual code Still, the initial execution ideas are simply faster to validate in the sketchy... memeburn.com/2012/03/how-m-pesa-disrupts-entire-economies/ An Introduction To Mobile Development 4 The Universe of Mobile Operating Systems The mobile space is much more diverse than other areas in IT When you are developing software for personal computers, you basically have 3 operating systems to chose from When it comes to mobile, there are many more This book provides an introduction to the mobile operating systems that are currently the most relevant,... putting a prototype together You can use whatever technique works for you From paper prototyping, using one of the specialised tools or other applications that have the functionality to put clickable journeys together (like standard presentation tools) If you have coding skills, Conceptional Design for Mobile 15 building a HTML prototype is also a good way to go You may be able to use available frameworks... via the Play Store and adds libraries such as the latest Google Maps If you are interested in authenticating users, you might want to have a look at the Google+ Sign capabilities that bring the benefit of real user data to your app The functionality is managed via OAuth 2.0 tokens that allow use of the Google Account on the user's behalf Testing The first step in testing an app is to run it on the. .. The Galaxy of Mobile: An Introduction 10 Anna Alfut BY Conceptional Design for Mobile Stumbling upon an idea is a wonderful Aha! moment You suddenly know what to do and have the confidence that your idea will solve the problem faced by your potential users Going from this early stage to the final app implementation is challenging Not only do you aim to build a stable application, you also want it to. .. instrumentation20 tools Tests can be written using the standard JUnit format, using the Android mock objects that are contained in the SDK The Instrumentation classes can monitor the UI and send system events such as key presses Your tests can then check the status of your app after these events have occurred MonkeyRunner21 is a powerful and extensible test automation tool for testing the entire app These tests . 14th edition Don’t Panic MOBILE DEVELOPER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY Enough Software GmbH + Co. KG. Follow us on Twitter: @enoughsoftware Services and Tools for All Mobile Platforms published by: 14th Edition February 2014 This Developer Guide is licensed under the Creative Commons Some Rights