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MobilePro #155: App Navigation Patterns, Apple gets FDA approval, OpenAI’s new o1 chain-of-thought models, Learn Git Branching, Void captures over a million Android TV boxes.

Hi ,

Welcome to the mobile app development world with the 155th edition of _mobilepro!

In this edition we cover mobile development community discussions on:

In our relatively new section captures internet jibber-jabber about the mobile ecosystem:

Every week we recommend mobile app development resources, and this week we feature:

1. Swift Cookbook

2. Mastering Kotlin for Android 14

3. .NET MAUI Projects

Today's news covers release stories on Apple, Android,and Microsoft. And if you are currently developing an iOS app, checkout this week's resources on iOS tools. Don’t miss this week’s tutorial from the book ‘C# 12 and .NET 8 – Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals’ .

P.S.: If you have any suggestions or feedback, or would like us to feature your project on a particular subject, please write to us. Just respond to this email!

If you liked this installment in our new series,fill in our survey below andwin a free PDF on your Packt account.

Thanks,
Apurva Kadam
Editor-in-Chief, Packt

What are Mobile developers discussing? What are the latest tips and tricks? Shortcuts and experiments? Cool tutorials? Releases and updates? Find it all out here.

Top 14 Chrome Extensions for Developers to Boost Productivity in 2024 – This article covers game-changing Chrome extensions. These tools took my workflow from chaotic to manageable, saving not only my time but possibly my job too. From squashing bugs to speeding up design work, these extensions will transform the way you code. If you're stuck pulling all-nighters and questioning your career choices, these 14 Chrome extensions might just be your lifesaver, helping you boost productivity, catch bugs early, and maybe even get back some work-life balance.

Mobile App Navigation: Patterns and Examples - In a mobile-first world, users should find it effortless to interact with any mobile app (or website, for that matter). The big idea is to prioritize what matters the most, given that the mobile devices include a small screen real estate. Navigation design for mobile apps helps in this direction.

How to Disable Screenshot Capture in Your React Native Expo App - Privacy and security are critical for mobile applications, developers often need to ensure that sensitive information displayed in their apps cannot be easily captured through screenshots or screen recordings. While React Native Expo provides a powerful framework for building cross-platform apps, it doesn’t offer a built-in way to disable screenshot capture. However, you can achieve this by integrating native code into your Expo project. In this article, we’ll walk you through the steps to disable screenshot capture in your React Native Expo app for both Android

Mastering Jetpack Compose: From Beginner to Pro - Feeling bogged down by complex UI code?Jetpack Composeis here to simplify your work and boost your team's productivity. Curious to learn more? Dive into our latest carousel post below to see these concepts in action and discover how Jetpack Compose can revolutionize your development process.

Wearable Technology and Android: Developing Apps for Smartwatches - The rise of wearable technology has transformed the way we interact with the digital world. Smartwatches, fitness trackers, and even smart glasses are now integral parts of our daily lives, offering convenience, real-time data, and personalized experiences. In this blog, we’ll explore the growing market for wearable tech and share insights into developing Android apps for smartwatches and other wearable devices.

Check this space for new repos, projects and tools each week! This week we bring you a collection of iOS tools for Images.

Viewer- Image viewer (or Lightbox) with support for local and remote videos and images.

OverlayComposite- An asynchronous, multithreaded, image compositing framework written in Swift.

MetalPetal- A GPU-accelerated image/video processing framework based onMetal.

Avatar- Generate random user Avatar images using CoreGraphics and QuartzCore.

Serrata- Slide image viewer library similar to Twitter and LINE.

StyleArt- Style Art library process images using COREML with a set of pre trained machine learning models and convert them to Art style.

greedo-layout-for-ios- Full aspect ratio grid layout for iOS.

Our weekly recommendations of the best resources in Mobile App Development!

Swift Cookbook

Mastering Kotlin for Android 14

.NET MAUI Projects

Random curious musings and interesting words about Mobile Dev on the Internet.

Apple Watch sleep apnea detection gets FDA approval - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Mondaypublished approvalfor sleep apnea detection on the Apple Watch Series 9,Series 10, and Watch Ultra 2. The green light comes four days ahead of the Series 10’s September 20 release date. The feature,announced at last week’s iPhone 16 event, will arrive as part of the imminent watchOS 11 release. Once enabled, it requires 10 nights of sleep tracking data spread out over a 30-day span to determine whether a user may have the condition. During that time, it also offers insights into nightly sleeping disturbances, utilizing the on-board accelerometer.

Notes on OpenAI’s new o1 chain-of-thought models - OpenAIreleased two major new preview modelstoday:o1-previewando1-mini(that mini one isnot a preview)—previously rumored as having the codename “strawberry”. There’s a lot to understand about these models—they’re not as simple as the next step up from GPT-4o, instead introducing some major trade-offs in terms of cost and performance in exchange for improved “reasoning” capabilities.

Learn Git Branching - Interested in learning Git? Well, you've come to the right place! "Learn Git Branching" is the most visual and interactive way to learn Git on the web; you'll be challenged with exciting levels, given step-by-step demonstrations of powerful features, and maybe even have a bit of fun along the way.

Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model - OpenAI truly does not want you to know what its latest AI model is "thinking." Since the companylaunchedits "Strawberry" AI model family last week, touting so-called reasoning abilities with o1-preview and o1-mini, OpenAI has been sending out warning emails and threats of bans to any user who tries to probe how the model works.

Void captures over a million Android TV boxes - Doctor Web experts have uncovered yet another case of an Android-based TV box infection. The malware, dubbedAndroid.Vo1d, has infected nearly 1.3 million devices belonging to users in 197 countries. It is a backdoor that puts its components in the system storage area and, when commanded by attackers, is capable of secretly downloading and installing third-party software.

An excerpt from ‘C# 12 and .NET 8 – Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals’ By Mark J. Price

Simplifying disposal by using the using statement

You can simplify the code that needs to check for anullobject and then call itsDisposemethod by using theusingstatement. Generally, I would recommend usingusingrather than manually callingDisposebecause it’s less code to write, unless you need a greater level of control.

Confusingly, there are two uses for theusingkeyword: importing a namespace and generating afinallystatement that callsDisposeon an object implementingIDisposable.

The compiler changes ausingstatement block into atry-finallystatement without acatchstatement. You can use nestedtrystatements; so, if you do want to catch any exceptions, you can, as shown in the following code example:

using (FileStream file2 = File.OpenWrite(

Path.Combine(path, "file2.txt")))

{

using (StreamWriter writer2 = new StreamWriter(file2))

{

try

{

writer2.WriteLine("Welcome, .NET!");

}

catch(Exception ex)

{

WriteLine($"{ex.GetType()

} says {ex.Message}"); }

} // Automatically calls Dispose if the object is not null.

} // Automatically calls Dispose if the object is not null.

You can even simplify the code further by not explicitly specifying the braces and indentation for theusing statements, as shown in the following code...read more.

Your dose of the latest releases, news and happenings in the Mobile Development industry!

Apple

iOS 18 is available today, making iPhone more personal and capable than ever - iOS 18is now available, bringing iPhone users around the world new ways to personalize their iPhone with deeper customization to the Home Screen and Control Center; the biggest-ever redesign to Photos, making it even easier to find and relive special moments; and major enhancements to Messages and Mail. Starting next month, iOS 18 will introduce Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that is incredibly useful and relevant while protecting users’ privacy and security.1

Apple Maps introduces new ways to explore the world - Beginning today, users can discover hikes in U.S. national parks, create custom walking routes, save favorite spots to a new Places Library, and more. With the release ofiOS 18,iPadOS 18,macOS Sequoia, andwatchOS 11today, Apple Maps is introducing new features to help users explore and find places they love.

watchOS 11 is available today - Introducing sleep apnea notifications, the Vitals app, training load, additional customization for Activity rings, a more personalized Smart Stack, and more

Android

Tools, not Rules: become a better Android developer with Compiler Explorer - Compiler Explorer is an interactive website for studying how compilers work. It is anopen source projectthat anyone can contribute to. This year, our engineers added support to Compiler Explorer for the Java and Kotlin programming languages on Android. You can use Compiler Explorer to understand how your source code is translated to assembly language, and how high-level programming language constructs in a language like Kotlin become low-level instructions that run on the processor.

Build adaptive apps with new Compose APIs, now stable! - The 1.0 stable release of the Compose adaptive APIs with Material guidance is now available, helping you build adaptive layouts that provide an optimized user experience on any window size.

Microsoft

Join the .NET Smart Components ecosystem - The .NET Smart Components are a set of sample drop-in UI components that make it easy to add AI-enabled features for useful scenarios, like auto-filling forms from clipboard data, smart text completions, and semantic search. The .NET Smart Components demonstrate how prepackaging AI-based functionality into reusable components makes it easier to integrate these features into existing apps. We’re making the .NET Smart Components source code available as reference sample implementations to help bootstrap a vibrant ecosystem of reusable .NET AI-powered components.

And that’s a wrap.

P.S.: If you have any suggestions or feedback, or would like us to feature your project on a particular subject, please write to us. Just respond to this email!