Adrian Hall

Adrian Hall

Microsoft Program Manager by day; Mobile Developer by night

Recent posts

The React Toolbox - 2018 Edition

March 23, 2018  5 minute read  

It’s been a while since I’ve been in web development. I’ve mostly been concentrating on mobile development instead. But this week I had cause to delve again. It’s amazing how much change there has been in the web world in just 2 years. React has become the force in web frameworks (Sorry Angular — I never liked you anyway) and developers are starting to coalesce around libraries and tools that make their life easier. I thought I’d put down my thoughts on the libraries that are making it into m...

Why I’m refactoring to Kotlin

March 21, 2018  5 minute read  

One of the things that is really cool about software development is that we are continually learning and adjusting. I spent a day recently learning Kotlin. I was so impressed with the language, I decided to refactor my entire Family Photos app. It did not take long. Why do I love Kotlin? I have to admit, I was skeptical at first. After all, I tried Swift for iOS as an alternate language and it felt foreign. Admittedly, Objective-C isn’t much better, but Swift definitely had some issues for ...

Testing Mobile Apps: A Primer

March 11, 2018  10 minute read  

Why should you test your mobile app? A recent study showed that almost a quarter of users only use a mobile app once, and a shocking 95% abandon an app within the first month. Some of the reasons that users abandon an app are due to content and engagement. The biggest non-content reasons for abandonment are application crashes and security concerns. No one can prevent all application crashes. The mobile ecosystem is too broad and unpredictable to provide a 100% guarantee. However, testing ens...

The Six Mobile Apps You Should Write

March 10, 2018  2 minute read  

Take a look at the mobile apps on the app stores and you will see patterns emerge. The same pattern is repeated time and time again. It’s crazy to think about this, but you only need to learn how to write six mobile apps that implement the common patterns. You can then pretty much write any app that is out there. Your First App: Notes or Task List There is a reason that just about every beginner tutorial uses the Todo app or the Notes app as the base. It’s a solid basic app that has a varie...

Creating a React Native bridge library

January 19, 2018  7 minute read  

React Native is really good at straddling the line between native and JavaScript. There is a bridge between the two that allows you to call native code from JavaScript. This is awesome for including things that require a special touch. Most React Native developers will never need to worry about the bridge because libraries exist to wrap a lot of the common native libraries that you see in Android and iOS. But what if you want to create a bridge library of your own? That’s a whole other effor...