How To Build Your Own Action For Google Home Using API.AI

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For the holidays, the owner of (and my boss at) thirteen23 gave each employee a Google Home device. If you don’t already know, Google Home is a voice-activated speaker powered by Google Assistant and is a competing product to Amazon’s line of Alexa products.

How To Build Your Own Action For Google Home Using API.AI

I already have the Amazon Echo, and as Director of Technology at thirteen23, I love tinkering with software for new products. For the Amazon Echo, you can create what are called “skills”, which allow you to build custom interactions when speaking to the device.

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Building For Mobile: RWD, PWA, AMP Or Instant Articles?

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As we look deep into 2017, one of the questions on every web developer’s mind ought to be, “What trend will define the web in 2017?” Just three years ago, we were talking about the “Year of Responsive Web Design”, and we’ve all seen how the stakes were raised when Google announced Mobilegeddon (21 April 2015) and started to boost the rankings of mobile-friendly websites in mobile search results.

Building For Mobile: RWD, PWA, AMP Or Instant Articles?

Today, as our findings indicate, responsive web design is the norm, with 7 out of 10 mobile-optimized websites being responsive, up from 5 last year, which begs the questions: What’s next? Where is it all heading? We solved the screen-size issue and had a great run for a few years — now what?

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Source: Smashing Magazine, Building For Mobile: RWD, PWA, AMP Or Instant Articles?

App Development Showdown: Why You Should Care About Revisiting The Native Vs. Hybrid Debate In 2017

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Back in 2007, the world met the iPhone for the very first time. After Apple’s product debut, it took less than six months for work to begin on PhoneGap, which would become one of the first and most adopted frameworks for hybrid mobile app development — that is, for apps written simultaneously for multiple platforms using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than coded in native languages.

App Development Showdown: Why You Should Care About Revisiting The Native Vs. Hybrid Debate In 2016

When compared with the prospect of learning an entirely new language and development environment in order to program iOS (and soon Android) apps, the appeal of this type of development to the already huge population of web developers in the world was palpable.

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The (Not So) Secret Powers Of The Mobile Browser

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Apple taught us, “There’s an app for that.” And we believed it. Why wouldn’t we? But time has passed since 2009. Our mobile users have gotten more mature and are starting to weigh having space for new photos against installing your big fat e-commerce app. Meanwhile, mobile browsers have also improved. New APIs are being supported, and they will bring native app-like functionality to the mobile browser.

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We can now access video and audio and use WebRTC to build a live video-chat web apps directly in the browser, no native app or plugin required. We can build progressive web apps that bring users an almost native app experience, with a launch icon, notifications, offline support and more. Using geolocation, battery status, ambient light detection, Bluetooth and the physical web, we can even go beyond responsive web design and build websites that will automagically adapt to users’ needs and context.

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How To Build A SpriteKit Game In Swift 3 (Part 3)

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Have you ever wondered what it takes to create a SpriteKit game? Do buttons seem like a bigger task than they should be? Ever wonder how to persist settings in a game? Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part three of this three-part series, we will finish up our RainCat game and complete our introduction to SpriteKit.

How To Build A SpriteKit Game In Swift 3 (Part 3)

If you missed out on the previous lesson, you can catch up by getting the code on GitHub. Remember that this tutorial requires Xcode 8 and Swift 3.

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