Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks Native Apps, Multiple Platforms

366 Pages·2016·13.5 MB·English

by  Tony Hillerson

Early praise for Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks
Tony does an excellent job at explaining the Xamarin concepts to first-time users!
His fun tutorials keep the reader engaged while teaching them step-by-step to
create their first mobile app in C#.
➤ Brandon Minnick
Customer-success engineer, Xamarin
The mobile software development landscape has never been wider than it is today.
Tony Hillerson’s Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks is a wonderful approach to
showcasing the many options available for mobile application development. You’ll
find this book is a valuable learning asset regardless of whether you’re starting
fresh in the industry or looking to pick up experience on another mobile platform.
This book is the "Three Wolf Moon" of the mobile software development world.
➤ Joshua Jamison
Software engineer, Ride
This book will teach you so much about mobile native and hybrid development
by taking you on an in-depth journey exploring many approaches to create incred-
ible apps across all the major platforms. An incredible and versatile source of
knowledge that I recommend to any developer of any level.
➤ Daniel Wanja
VP of engineering, Blinker
I found this book much more engaging than I had anticipated. I am impressed by
the author’s ability to cover the material with a delicate balance between glossing
over important details and providing too much detail— overwhelming the reader.
I highly recommend this title to anyone interested in a practical head-to-head
comparison of modern mobile application-development approaches.
➤ Daniel Lamb
Senior software engineer; Technical architect and author, CoStar Group
Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks
Native Apps, Multiple Platforms
Tony Hillerson
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Raleigh, North Carolina
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ISBN-13: 978-1-68050-148-3
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Book version: P1.0—July 2016
Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . vii
The Story So Far... . . . . . . . . . . . ix
1. Day 0: Setting Up the API . . . . . . . . . . 1
Setting Up and Running the API 1
Reviewing and Testing the Endpoints 3
Now We’re Ready 6
Part I — Official Native Platforms
2. Mobile Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
A World-Clock App 10
Day 1: A Time for Beginnings 11
Day 2: Making Time 21
Day 3: Time to Move 32
Wrapping Up the Web App 48
3. iOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
A Weather-Forecast App 52
Day 1: What’s It Like Out? 52
Day 2: What’s It Like There? 66
Day 3: Expanding Our Horizons 80
Wrapping Up iOS 99
4. Android . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
A Currency-Conversion App 102
Day 1: How Far Does a Dollar Go? 103
Day 2: What Can I Get for a Buck? 117
Day 3: Time Is Money 127
Wrapping Up Android 139
•
Contents vi
5. Universal Windows Platform . . . . . . . . 141
A Stock-Quote App 142
Day 1: The Initial Investment 143
Day 2: Trending Up 151
Day 3: A Wider Market 163
Wrapping Up Windows Phone 178
Part II — Cross-Platform Tools
6. RubyMotion . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
A To-Do App 184
Day 1: ✓ Android 185
Day 2: ✓ iOS 206
Day 3: ✓ Cross-Platform 218
Wrapping Up RubyMotion 227
7. Xamarin . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
A Calculator App 230
Day 1: Adding Up the Platforms 230
Day 2: Dividing Up the Solution 250
Day 3: Subtracting Platform-Specific Code 266
Wrapping Up Xamarin 279
8. React Native . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
A Note-Taking App 282
Day 1: Comparing Notes 283
Day 2: Exchanging Notes 299
Day 3: Taking Note of Where We Are 311
Wrapping Up React Native 324
9. Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Official Native Platforms 327
Cross-Platform Tools 329
What’s Next? 332
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Acknowledgments
When people ask where I got the concept for this book, I joke that it sprang
fully formed into my head because I needed to answer questions about or
build apps for multiple mobile platforms so many times. It certainly feels that
way, but what most likely happened was that I had hundreds of conversations
with coworkers, friends, clients, and industry experts about building apps
for multiple platforms. Add to those conversations the great esteem I have
for the Seven in Seven series, and you can see how I came to the conclusion
to write this book.
So, then, thank you to all of my coworkers and friends with whom I’ve had
these conversations and built those apps over the years. We commiserated,
we argued, we experimented, we built stuff, and I learned a great deal from
all of you.
Thank you also to Dave and Andy, the publishers; Bruce, the Seven in Seven
series editor; and Jackie, the editor of this book, for helping me to make this
an addition to the series that I enjoy so much. I really appreciate the
opportunity.
Writing a book like this, with seven technologies, requires more eyes than
just mine on the code; it requires the help of reviewers both reviewing the
book as a whole and diving deeply into technologies as experts. Here are the
reviewers who made this book possible by finding bugs and corrections and
offering style tips and encouragement. Thanks to all of you:
Michael Hunter, Kevin Garriott, Daniel Wanja, Loren Sands-Ramshaw,
Maricris Nonato, Javier Collado, Alessandro Bahgat, Daniel Lamb, Nishant
Srivastava, Gábor László Hajba, Ramaninder Singh Jhajj, Stephen Wolff,
Stefan Turalski, Kaan Karaca, Fabrizio Cucci, Jacob Henry, Colin Gray, Seth
Howard, Eric Langland, Rob Malko, Brandon Minnick, Jack Moffitt, and
Joshua Jamison.
Finally, thanks to my wife, Lori, and our kids, Diāna, Lincoln, and Titus, for
allowing me the time to write another book.
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The Story So Far...
In the beginning there was a mobile platform, and it was good. It ran on the
best mobile hardware available, both phones and tablets. It had an app store,
where consumers could buy new software for their mobile devices. Developers
liked to develop for this platform because the devices had fancy UIs, powerful
SDKs were available, and people could make money from the app store to
support their development.
There was a competing platform, though, and a lot of those devices looked
pretty good, too. But it wasn’t that easy to develop on. Its marketplace wasn’t
as good and the toolset was really hard to work with. If you were a developer
on the first platform, it didn’t seem very appealing to try to learn a whole dif-
ferent platform. If you had a good thing going, there was not a lot of value in
learning all new tools instead of spending time building apps you already
knew how to build. The best bet was to stick with what was comfortable and
just ride that gravy train to an early retirement.
And then everything changed.
The Only Constant
In case you didn’t already guess, the mobile platform I was just talking about
was Windows Mobile. Back in the days before the iPhone changed the mobile
space, Windows Mobile had a pretty good thing going. It already had everything
the iPhone introduced: an app store (by a different name) and good tools (for
the time), and it ran on pretty sweet devices (by those days’ standards). It
had a big competitor, or maybe more than one—who can remember back that
far? The point is that if you were making your living by developing Windows
Mobile apps then, there’s a really good chance you no longer are. Not that it
would have helped to have been proficient at more than one platform when
iOS came out and made them all pretty much obsolete. The point is not how
many platforms you’re proficient on, but rather how proficient you are at
learning new platforms.
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