Note: This course is a recording of a live workshop I held in July 2022. It is presented to you raw, unedited, and unredacted. You’ll be able to experience the entire workshop as if you were really there: typos, questions, answers, tangents, and even an embarrassing moment or two. I hope you enjoy it. Is this youDo you have a great idea for a mobile app, but don’t have the team to get it built on both Android and iOS? Do you have web development skills and want to put your app into one or both App Stores? Do you want to jump into mobile web development but don’t know where to start? If you said yes to any of these questions, this course is for you. Have you ever been asked to do the impossible?One hot summer day, my team received a somewhat frantic email. Due to some hardware support issues, a very large and visible part of our business was at risk of being shut down. They wanted to know what we could do about it. The manufacturer no longer supported the handheld scanners used by our employees at our warehouse facility. After a pending upgrade to the facility’s WiFi, they would stop working entirely. We were asked to solve the problem before the WiFi upgrade was to occur. Our first question back to the business was what type of hardware they had in mind for the replacement. They were looking at three potential options: an Android device that was specifically designed to work in an unforgiving warehouse environment, an iPhone, or possibly an iPod Touch. We had already had some success with using iPhones, so recommended that. However, the managers in the warehouse were concerned that iPhones and iPod Touch devices would not be resilient enough for their operation. Could we possibly support both?Our immediate response was that supporting both Android and iOS would most likely double the development cost, the development time, and possibly both. Not surprisingly, they were not thrilled by that news. The timeline was somewhat fixed. The devices would stop working once that WiFi upgrade happened, and nothing we could do would delay that. Our choice came down to forcing the business to pick a single platform or spinning up two teams to build two separate applications. We were told to come up with a solution that did not involve writing the application twice, so that’s exactly what we did. Does that sound familiar?If you’ve been around the block a few times, you know what this feels like. If you’re just starting off your software development career, you may not have experienced this yet. Eventually, someone is going to ask you to do something you simply cannot do. It isn’t your fault. It seems to be the nature of the business. Are you ready to build your first mobile app in just a few hours?Fortunately, building a mobile app for multiple platforms with a single codebase is not impossible, and a lot less difficult than you might think. That’s what this workshop is all about. Using modern web development tools and frameworks such as Ionic, Angular, and Capacitor, you can replicate our success and build fully-functional mobile applications for both iOS and Android in a fraction of the time it would take to build the same app twice. What will you learn?The workshop is a recording of four live, interactive sessions. Now, you can participate as if you were actually there. Over the duration of the workshop, you will build a working mobile application. Session 1During the first session, you’ll learn the basics of Ionic Framework development and build your first app, with a few functional pages of content. Session 2In the second session, you will flesh out most of the main page’s UI with some attractive and useful Ionic components. Session 3Hopefully, by now you’re comfortable with the basics, so it’s time to dive into form generation and validation, collecting information from the user. Session 4In the final session, you will generate an iOS or Android app from the existing code, in either Xcode or Android Studio. Meet the TeacherI’m Mike Callaghan, a software developer of nearly 30 years and an Ionic Developer Expert who’s been using Ionic and Angular when both of them were still in their version 1 phase. Are there prerequisites?You should have a computer capable of running a web editor (Visual Studio Code will be shown in the workshop).To build an app for iOS devices, you must have a Mac and an Apple Developer account. To build an Android app, you can use any computer capable of running Android Studio. Please download and install the above software before the first session. Having a little experience with web development and/or Angular may be helpful, though it isn’t strictly required.
