Smashing Mobile — Responsive Design, iOS, Android and Mobile Development

Category: Mobile

This category features articles on best and emerging practices for responsive website design, Web apps and native apps. While the mobile Web is still in it's infancy, we can learn from the experiences of professionals who are working on mobile every day. Curated by Derek Allard. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.

Popular tags in this category: Android, iPad, iPhone, iOS, Tablets, CSS, HTML.

Adapting To A Responsive Design (Case Study)

This is the story of what we learned during a redesign for our most demanding client — ourselves! In this article, I will explain, from our own experience of refreshing our agency website, why we abandoned a separate mobile website and will review our process of creating a new responsive design.

At Cyber-Duck, we have been designing both responsive websites and adaptive mobile websites for several years now. Both options, of course, have their pros and cons.

Facing The Challenge: Building A Responsive Web Application

We are talking and reading a lot about responsive Web design (RWD) these days, but very little attention is given to Web applications. Admittedly, RWD still has to be ironed out. But many of us believe it to be a strong concept, and it is here to stay. So, why don’t we extend this topic to HTML5-powered applications?

Because responsive Web applications (RWAs) are both a huge opportunity and a big challenge, I wanted to dive in. Building a RWA is more feasible than you might think. In this article, we will explore ideas and solutions.

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The State Of Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web design has been around for some years now, and it was a hot topic in 2012. Many well-known people such as Brad Frost and Luke Wroblewski have a lot of experience with it and have helped us make huge improvements in the field. But there’s still a whole lot to do.

In this article, we will look at what is currently possible, what will be possible in the future using what are not yet standardized properties (such as CSS Level 4 and HTML5 APIS), and what still needs to be improved. This article is not exhaustive, and we won’t go deep into each technique, but you’ll have enough links and knowledge to explore further by yourself.

A Client- And Server-Side ApproachProviding The Best Mobile User Experience Possible

Now and again, I hit the swimming pool. It’s a good way to exercise, but also to relax after a long day in front of my PC. I can do quite a few laps in my front crawl, but only because I don’t use my legs much. I kick steadily to ensure that my legs stay lifted and don’t slow me down. I don’t use my legs much for forward propulsion.

Does this relate to mobile Web development, responsive Web design and server-side device detection? The analogy is a stretch, but yes, it does.

Keeping The Big <picture> SmallHow To Avoid Duplicate Downloads In Responsive Images

The <picture> element is a new addition to HTML5 that’s being championed by the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group (RICG). It is intended to provide a declarative, markup-based solution to enable responsive images without the need of JavaScript libraries or complicated server-side detection.

The <picture> element supports a number of different types of fallback content, but the current implementation of these fallbacks is problematic. In this article, we’ll explore how the fallbacks work, how they fail and what can be done about it.

Brave New WorldDesigning For A Maturing Android

Android is huge: 480 million people currently use Android devices, and 1 million new devices are activated daily. This means that every three weeks, the number of people who activate new Android devices is equal to the entire population of Australia. (Recent studies by Nielsen show that more Android devices are on the market than iOS devices.)

Popular apps that become available on Android experience huge growth. For example, Instagram grew by 10 million users with the launch of its Android app — in just 10 days.

Animations, Actions And Particle SystemsCreating Realistic iPhone Games With Cocos2D

By Zack Grossbart
April 16th, 2013
Games, IPhone
1 Comment

Animation makes games real. Movement adds excitement to a game and makes the characters more realistic. In this article, we’ll look at the Cocos2D library and how it supports programmatic animations in iPhone games.

This article is part of a series that teaches you how to create iPhone games based on the open-source game Seven Bridges. Make sure to check out the first article in the series, “Designing an Open-Source iPhone Game” and look at the source code in the Seven Bridges GitHub repository.

Case StudyImprove Mobile Support With Server-Side-Enhanced Responsive Design

In many ways, responsive Web design deserves a big share of the honor for making the Web more usable on non-desktop devices. This trend of letting the browser determine more about how a Web page should be displayed makes sense, especially now that mobile browsers are slightly more trustworthy than in the old days of mobile.

However, a responsive website is not automatically a mobile-friendly website. Amid the buzz of trendy Web development techniques, the good ol’ Web server doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves. Modern Web development should be about finding the right balance between server-side and client-side implementation.

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