OrchardNest

A FlatList is used to render lists in a React Native application. We can also use React to render a list in React Native, which is achieved by looping through a map. But doing so can lead to performance issues, which we’ll look at...

Maps are an integral part of a lot of mobile apps nowadays. They are used for everything from finding directions somewhere to tracking one’s location when out for a jog. It’s a good thing, then, that maps are very easy to...

Today we are excited to release flakiness detection in Waldo. For those not familiar with Waldo: our product allows nontechnical people to create, maintain and orchestrate automation testing for their mobile apps right from the...

Sound in any mobile application is a pleasurable user experience. It’s a must in gaming applications, but also used in a variety of other applications. It also enhances the user experience when we play a small sound on the press of a...

If you come from a web background, you know that CSS transforms are extremely helpful. You can use them to create animations and visually appealing UI elements. In fact, a lot of modern web design is inspired by transforms. React Native...

We can create a grid system in React Native in a lot of ways. One of the best ways to do it is using FlatList, which is provided by React Native. This post is about creating a responsive grid system using FlatList. To implement this,...

Device information is very important for a developer in order to know the types of devices that users are using. To give a better user experience, we need this information. It can also be used to trace the crashes in apps. There’s a...

Introduction As an app developer, you want to keep users of your app informed of important information, especially when you apply big changes in your app. In user interface design, we use alert dialogs for this purpose. An alert dialog is...

Introduction Barcodes are everywhere—If you have gone grocery shopping you have most likely encountered them. Each item that the store sells has a code that uniquely identifies it. The barcode is a visual representation of that code that a...

RecyclerView is a ViewGroup ideal for displaying dynamic data. An example of such dynamic data is a list of weather forecasts for multiple days. Each item on the list can have properties like the date, temperature, and city for the...

Introduction Mobile apps can make use of data stored on the Internet or stored on the device. For example, consider an app that displays the latest movies currently available to watch. The list of movie titles, summary text, review...

You might know Kotlin as a modern programming language and as the official language for building Android apps in 2021. What then is Kotlin/Native? Kotlin/Native makes it possible to compile Kotlin code to native binaries that are capable...

Introduction There are certain points in your app’s user journey that require the user to provide input before proceeding. When this occurs, a pop-up window appears for the user to interact with to provide their input. The rest of...

When designing a mobile app, it’s important to create a seamless and fluid experience for users as they navigate from one page to another. This is especially important when users drill down to deeper levels in your page hierarchy. For...

In Android development, UI design happens in an XML layout file. Then, the business logic code is written in a Kotlin or Java file. As a result, a basic activity (a single screen) is made up of two files. First is the activity layout XML...

Introduction As the content in a mobile app grows, it is useful to start organizing it into pages. To help users quickly get to the page they want, apps incorporate some form of navigation. Some app designs use tabs to enable jumping from...

It’s safe to say every Android developer has used the findViewById() method at some point. The method is used for referencing views in Kotlin or the Java part of an app. However, writing findViewById() multiple times in a huge...

AsyncTask is an Android API that handles asynchronous jobs. To put this another way, AsyncTask provides a mechanism for handling background jobs. Some processes in an app might be too heavy or involve waiting for responses. It’s not...

Introduction When designing user experiences for your app, you may decide to show or hide widgets as conditions change in the app, such as in response to user actions or to adapt to available space on the screen. Consider a calculator app,...

Are you looking to build an iOS app in 2021? There are so many tools to choose from. React Native and Swift are up there in the list of the top tools. Hence, it makes sense to have an in-depth knowledge of what each tool offers. A good way...

Introduction A card is a tool used to summarize an object’s key properties on a small two-dimensional canvas. Even before the invention of mobile apps and websites, cards proved useful in a number of contexts. A few examples of cards...

Introduction When crafting a user experience for your mobile app, you often need the user to select one item from a list of options. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as collecting information on a form, customizing settings, or...

The big challenge with mobile development is managing all the operating systems (OSs) and devices out there. People have Android and iOS devices of different software types. That meant you needed to write the same code multiple times. But...

Modals, or mobile modals, are used to present an application user with some useful and important information. These are mainly large overlays, which sometimes cover the whole app when it’s opened. But they can be used in different...

Introduction AppBars are important components in an app. Since the screen real estate on mobile devices is limited, an AppBar plays an important role in helping users know where they are in the application. For example, just about every...

Developing web or mobile apps today often uses dependencies to make a developer’s life easy. However, using that many dependencies in a project can lead to a version mismatch error. In this post, you’ll learn what version...

Introduction Colors serve an important function in life. We use colors to signal important information, like with traffic lights, for example. A red light means stop and a green light means go. In addition to signaling important...

Mobile apps have exploded in popularity over recent years. The introduction of the iPhone 3G in 2008 spawned a new industry overnight. App development is now an industry that generates more than $34 billion in revenue. To reach all...

Be it an e-commerce app, a cryptocurrency trading app, or a social media app, all modern apps use side menus to offer a seamless navigation experience to their users. Side menus are intuitive to use and barely take up any visible space on...

With the introduction of SwiftUI in 2019, Apple made clear what direction it wanted developers to take on the framework. Many saw it as a move needed to bring the Apple ecosystem to new heights—especially in terms of innovation and...

In 2019, Apple introduced a change to the way developers could design apps for the Apple ecosystem. The launch of SwiftUI began a long process of change that arguably was well overdue. It has dramatically benefited developers’...

Firebase is a serverless or backend as a service (BaaS) solution from Google. What that means is, with firebase, you worry less about building a backend and focus more on building your mobile app. To further explain what Firebase is,...