Arter & Kirkwood | Mobile apps for business

Blog posts and articles from Arter Kirkwood & Associates, a mobile app development company based in Alberta, Canada. Read the insights and findings from our top authors below. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or would like us to write on a particular topic.

Setup APNs for Your iOS App in 4 Easy Steps

January 23, 2017 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 1 comment

Notifications matter! Notifications done right can significantly boost app usage. Notifications done wrong can have the opposite effect, driving app usage down and causing your your app to be deleted outright. Doing notifications right isn’t easy, but we can help! Research has shown that push notifications boost app engagement by 88%, but before that can be […]

Announcing Arter Kirkwood & Associates

December 23, 2016 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

We are pleased to announce that in 2017, Arter Mobilize Inc will be operating as Arter Kirkwood & Associates in recognition of Evan Kirkwood’s contribution to the success of Arter Mobilize. Evan exudes qualities that are at the foundation of our business including superior customer service and professionalism, strong leadership and teamwork, exceptional technical competence […]

Tips for supporting accessibility in iOS Apps

April 18, 2016 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Supporting accessibility features in iOS Apps can be tricky, but it’s important to do. In their Accessibility Programming Guide for iOS, Apple points out we should do this because: It increases your user base It helps meet guideline from governing bodies It’s the right thing to do And, as Jakob Nielsen points out, the overlap […]

MVP: how minimum is minimum?

January 8, 2016 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Lean and agile philosophies place heavy emphasis on the notion of a minimum viable product (MVP) when considering bringing a new product to market or into operation. MVP is fairly commonplace: well known but not well understood, very much like the terms “lean” and “agile” are. I often hear people proclaim their teams are lean […]

Faking visibility of system status for camera input

November 30, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

How do you communicate to users that an App is doing something “passive,” like waiting for input from a camera? Sometimes you have to fake it! Visibility of system status is one of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, and is stated as: The system should always keep users informed about what is going […]

Getting started with continuous integration for iOS using Ship.io

September 30, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Continuous Integration (CI) is tremendously valuable to an agile development process, but also require some upkeep that’s always felt “costly” to me (and annoying, as I’m generally lazy when it comes to “sys admin” tasks). UPDATE October 6, 2015: I’m sad to report that Ship.io is shutting down as of October 30, 2015. You can read more […]

Mobile app audio player state design

August 30, 2015 / by Wes Byers / Uncategorized / 0 comments

The challenge with a paper-based design is that, although the player control is shown correctly, we have taken a snapshot of that player’s state at one particular time. Let’s look at that again: If you haven’t yet seen the Design choices to consider for a mobile app audio player that have influenced these player state designs, consider […]

How to build a UX-friendly progress indicator with AngularJS

August 18, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

This post demonstrates building an animated progress indicator using AngularJS, and follows user experience (UX) recommendations for visibility of system status. To skip right to the demo, you can check out this JSFiddle. As one of the original 10 heuristics for web usability, visibility of system status remains one of the most important and universally applicable principles […]

Ending a sprint: a state of mind and discipline

August 1, 2015 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Sticking to established sprint windows, whether 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks in duration, is a state of mind that requires discipline. Things don’t always go to plan during a sprint. Elaboration of requirements, refinements to designs, organizational change, other external influences can result in the development team not getting through all the planned features […]

Design choices to consider for a mobile app audio player

June 30, 2015 / by Wes Byers / Uncategorized / 0 comments

We implemented an audio player on a recent project. If we could do it all again, this is the trade secret advice that we learned and would tell ourselves. This is part of a multi-part article that elaborates on the player from design to implementation. Design Before jumping straight into implementation, we made sure to mock up […]

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