Intro to Mobile Development Process | Los Angeles

About this class

The course aims to familiarize students with concepts that are unique to the mobile app development challenge. You will walk away with an understanding of the terminology and workflows required to build an app such that you can identify what you find interesting and dive in further with an understanding of "the big picture."

The course covers the following high level topics: A fictitious application to use as a demo and some motivation behind it, visual application design (UI and UX), mobile layout concepts and implementations on Android and iOS, a basic understanding of objects and classes, the MVC (model, view, controller) pattern and how it applies to mobile development, how data and databases are handled on mobile, the mobile application life cycle and a brief primer on the specific Android and iOS coding environments.

Takeaways

• Understanding of the types of challenges and patterns used in app design
• Understanding the difference between UI and UX, basics of the tools and concepts used in designing each
• A conceptual understanding of "objects" and "classes" and how they apply to mobile apps
• An overview of MVC -- the design pattern used since the 1960s for building interactive applications and still in use in Android and iOS
• Understanding of how mobile apps store data, both locally and in "the cloud"
• Understanding of the application lifecycle, how apps respond to being put in the background or killed by a task manager.
• An overview of the tools specific to writing code for both Android and iOS

Prereqs & Preparation

Pen and paper, an open mind, and a willingness to participate. Laptops are not required. Programming knowledge is not a prerequisite.