Building a mobile application is hard. Building a beautiful mobile application is even more difficult. As a mobile developer without strong design skills, building a good-looking application for people to use directly from the app store is quite a challenge. On-top of design, the typical price for a mobile app can vary depending on the quality of the app you want and the platforms you need to support. I typically believe that a mobile app is much like a car purchase, you can get a reliable app typically starting at $25,000, however if you want that high-quality, turbo-charged Ferrari app, you ..read more

User-Centered Design We have one main goal when creating mobile apps, and that is to create apps that don’t need to be explained. But how do we create apps that do not need to be explained? Let’s break this down a bit further. Usability is the degree to which an app is easy and efficient to use. A user interface is like a joke, if you have to explain it, it’s not that good. User-Centered Design is a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. This approach uses real people rather than an ideal ..read more

What’s Next I wanted to provide an update as to what’s next for this blog, and some of the developments I’ve been working on since. I know this blog has been awfully quiet since January of 2018, so here’s a quick update. Personal Life In March of 2018, my daughter Audrey was born. Transitioning to parenthood was a challenge in itself! I mean, how could you not love this face? If there’s anything I learned about becoming a father, it’s that you need to make time as it’s not magically handed to you. Someday your life will change for the best, and you have to put things on the shelf for awh ..read more

Preface This is a continuation post of https://www.jon-douglas.com/2017/08/01/being-more-reactive/ in which we will explore how we can apply Reactive Extensions(RX) to our Xamarin.Android project. We will visually show how Reactive Extensions(RX) and a touch of Reactive UI(RxUI) to accomplish our previous example in Xamarin.Android Introducing ReactiveUI ReactiveUI is an advanced, composable, functional reactive model-view-viewmodel framework for all .NET platforms. The cool thing about ReactiveUI is that it can be used in small sections of your project, or it can be the main driving force ..read more