Posted by Joanna Smith, Developer Advocate
Magic moments happen when your app does something very useful with minimal effort from your users -- like figuring out their location for them automatically. The new Places lesson in the Advanced Android App Development course teaches you how to add a Place Picker to your app so that users can pick a nearby location without having to type anything.
The Advanced Android App Development course, built by Udacity in conjunction with Google, is a follow-up course to Developing Android apps. The advanced course is for Android Developers who are ready to learn how to polish, productionize and publish their app, and even distribute it through Google Play.
Updates to the course also include an explanation of the new GCM Receiver, as well as an entirely new lesson on publishing your app, which explains how to build and sign an APK so you you can distribute your app on Google Play.
After all, why build an app if you can’t get it to your users? Get started now, because it's going to be awesome!
Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Program Manager
The Holidays. Food for the body. Food for the mind. Google and Udacity offer you 31 courses that will make your mouth water and your mind dance. Savor one or several of our 31 self-paced online training courses to indulge your curiosity, expand your knowledge, and hone new skills. Choose from Android, Web, Entrepreneurship, or Cloud and Backend tracks. Are you ready?
More and more people around the world are embracing mobile at an increasing pace, whether on their phones, in their cars, at home, and around their wrists. Learn to build apps for them!
Refine your web development skills for mobile. Create fast, fluid user experiences. Deploy for all desktop and mobile devices. Streamline checkout and payment. Learn how to build beautiful, performant, responsive applications for the world's largest platform.
Does your app need to support more users? (Congratulations!) Do you want to move data handling for an existing app from the device to the cloud? Learn how to take advantage of public cloud infrastructure to support millions of users and terabytes of data.
Start the year with a new start up. That says it all. Take these courses to learn how to do it successfully.
And that’s it. 31 courses that will catapult your skills and make 2016 your best year yet! Happy Holidays!
By Nazmul Idris, a Developer Advocate at Google who's passionate about Android and UX design
As a mobile developer, how do you create 5-star apps that your users will not just download, but love to use every single day? How do you get your app noticed, and how do you drive engagement? One way is to focus on excellence in design — from visual and interaction design to user research, in other words: UX design.
If you’re new to the world of UX design but want to embrace it to improve your apps, we've created a new online course just for you. The UX Design for Mobile Developers course teaches you how to put your designer hat on, in addition to your developer hat, as you think about your apps' ideal user and how to meet their needs.
The course is divided into a series of lessons, each of which gives you practical takeaways that you can apply immediately to start seeing the benefits of good UX design.
Without jargon or buzzwords, the course teaches you where you should focus your attention, to bring in new users, keep existing users engaged, and increase your app's ratings. You'll learn how to optimize your app, rather than optimizing login/signup forms, and how to use low-resolution wireframing.
After you take the course, you'll "level up" from being an excellent developer to becoming an excellent design-minded developer.
Check out the video below to get a taste of what the course is like, and click through this short deck for an overview of the learning plan.
The full course materials — all the videos, quizzes, and forums — are available for free for all students by selecting “View Courseware”. Personalized ongoing feedback and guidance from Coaches is also available to anyone who chooses to enroll in Udacity’s guided program.
If that’s not enough, for even more about UX design from a developer's perspective, check out our YouTube UXD series, on the AndroidDevelopers channel: http://bit.ly/uxdplaylist.
By Reto Meier, Head of Scalable Developer Advocacy
Today I’m proud to announce the latest resource for learning to develop Android apps: Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals.
Android Fundamentals is an online training course featuring Google Developer Advocates Reto Meier, Dan Galpin, and Katherine Kuan, working with the team at Udacity that’s advanced and technical enough for experienced developers who are new to Android — maybe even new to mobile — but not new to programming.
The course offers step-by-step training in which you’ll build an Android app, and learn best practices of mobile development in general and Android development in particular.
This guided course, along with UX Design for Mobile Developers and Mobile Web Development, complement our existing material—including documentation, samples, and videos — to offer a solid grounding in developing great experiences for people using mobile devices. Check out the trailer below for an overview of what's in the course.
Mobile devices are the platform that will bring the next five billion people online. With Android expanding rapidly into emerging markets, and growing beyond phones and tablets into wearables, auto, and TV, learning the fundamentals behind Android development represents an opportunity to affect and improve the lives of billions of people.
We look forward to seeing what the next wave of Android developers build, and we’ll keep exploring new ways to help you become better developers.