1. Did you know the school district had an app? Let’s look at it. What do you think? Would you use it? Why or why not?
2. We’re going to watch the first 3 minutes of a video of a free app development class that is available online via edX. The intro video talks about how technology and people have evolved to rely on mobile devices in daily life and what that means for web designers. If you’re interested to learn even more in this class it is free to sign up and join!
Consider:
How do you interact with your laptop and how is that different than how you interact with your smartphone?
What purpose does an app or website serve? Get information? Do work? Entertain?
What experience are you designing for? What problem are you looking to solve/address?
3. Let’s look at some apps. Which ones do you use and why? What do you like about them?
Let’s check out the top free and paid apps on iTunes.
Let’s look at some of the Olympic apps.
4. Let’s practice. We’re going to try creating an app prototype on fluidui.com. This is an easy to use, attractive site to quickly creating workable prototypes. You don’t even need an account right now to just start playing around.
I would like you to create at least two to three different screens for an app. Think about re-creating or re-inventing an app you like, or maybe make an app for the school website, the school store, Mustang sports, a club or team, whatever.
Double-click to create a new page and on the left you will see a menu with icons and other items to drag onto your screen.
5. Android vs iOS (Apple)
Creating apps for an iPhone or iPad is different than for other systems, such as an Android phone. Phones and tablets that run Android are open, meaning anyone can develop anything and share it. We are going to be doing that so we can test our apps on our class Android device, my old Samsung Galaxy S2.
Check out the Apple developer website. It is free to register as an Apple developer. Generally speaking, if you want to develop apps for Apple devices you have to do so exclusively on a Mac.
When we develop our first app with Dreamweaver CS6 you will see that the app will be available for all operating systems but we will only be able to download it onto the Android phone to test it.
What is Android? It is an open operating system created by Google. It runs on most phones that aren’t iPhones. There are tons of versions of Android and there are tons of devices that run differing versions. Just check this out:
Also see:
cell/wireless coverage in area and top carriers
6. Dreamweaver CS6
Here is a video overview of creating and packaging an app with Dreamweaver CS6. This is the project you will work on when we come back from February break.
How can you get Dreamweaver or any other Adobe product you like? Every Adobe product is available to download for free to try for one month. Students and teachers also receive a significant discount to purchase the software and/or to subscribe to Creative Cloud. We’ll talk more about this today.