It is no surprise that users are increasingly accessing content via mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, and Google Android powered devices. As a business, you need to reach all of your customers on any device for your marketing and consumer deliverable services. Wouldn't it be great to launch an application that was accessible to any web based mobile device? Well, you can….
bMobile is our newest mobile development project designed to appear as a native application, but be accessible from any device over the web. Now you can have the best of both worlds, a mobile, cross device, application that is accessible over the web, and the ability to launch your application in device specific App Stores like iTunes. Naysayers will point out “But what if I want to use device hardware such as contact lists, the camera, or accelerometer?” Well, you can do that also from a mobile web application with a little extra code sugar. This is a revolutionary way to capture your customers and clients through mobile devices, anytime, anywhere. As an added bonus, iPhone users can “Add to Home Screen”, giving them a native application feel with no toolbars and a start-up screen, a dedicated icon on their home screen, and all without ever having to visit an App Store.
User Interface & Layout
We choose to run a small javascript slide show on our home screen, to mimic the design of our normal website. Our slide show presents a few of the many options we have available for our clients when developing mobile applications. The slide show also allows for native swipe gestures, just in case its not quick enough for you.
We ran a dedicated toolbar on the base of the bMobile application, with icons familiar to the user. As we are limited to 5 icons when most smart phones are in portrait view, we choose only the core components of our services. Each toolbar icon brings up a nested list to further drill down into services provided by Byron Baker Design, LLC.
Graphing Application Gallery
One of the primary things we wanted to showcase within our application was the ability to deliver rich touch activated graphs ready for mobile deployment. We choose to pull some live data about one of our favorite companies, Apple, and display this data for our users. Live market data is shown in our line graph, and the current weather conditions at Apple headquarters in Cupertino is shown in a gauge style environment. Additionally, we have provided an interactive pie chart, showing a variety of statistics on mobile device market share by manufacturer. Our pie chart allows the user to tap on a segment of the pie for a detailed description of that segment, rotate the pie with a slide gesture, and remove segments by tapping on the legend items.
Live Twitter Feed
Our favorite social platform gets a nice place with our live Twitter Feed bringing you the latest Tweets from us. The possibilities of coarse are endless, and we could have easily applied this technology to LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google+, but we love Twitter and their Application Programming Interface is a model that we wish everyone would follow!
iPhone & iPad Native App Interface
For iPhone and iPad users, you get a little sugar added to your experience. Tapping the bookmark icon in the toolbar allows you to add bMobile to your home screen. Now you have our application with an icon placed on your home screen. Not only does this give you easy access to our application, but you also get the feel of a native application without toolbars and searchbars. Now you can see the beauty of what a mobile web application can give you, the look and feel of a native application, without the App Store. Beautiful…
Enterprise and Large-Cap Business Deployment
So your company has just deployed several thousand iPad's to your sales team, and you have several thousand more Blackberry mobile phones deployed to your management staff. Normally if you wanted an application to deliver the latest data to your teams, you would have to develop applications for both devices, and install that application on all of your companies mobile devices. But there may be an easier method, deploying a mobile web application inside your companies intranet that will run on all devices via the web browser. This eliminates the headache of developing for multiple platforms, and installing the application on all of your devices. Simply upload the application to your companies secure server, and your teams can access your data and application from any device. I don’t think we have to say it…. major game changer.