'Net Features : mobile development

Working with a Developer, a Balancing Act

Administrator — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:46:00 GMT

The most successful client-customer relationships are built on trust, and it takes finding the right balance of input from both sides to establish that trust. The same is true for successful business-developer relationships.

Typically, before a business begins working with a development partner on a new website or mobile application, the leadership team has a general idea of what it should look like and what functions it should be able to perform. And with little knowledge of the development process, they have probably even already outlined all of the various specs that their users require.

Since most developers have experience in a number of successful and not-so-successful launches, they often know which ideas are realistic and which may be unattainable. This makes it necessary for business leaders and their development partners to find the right creative balance, so that clients get their most important features, and developers are given the freedom to work in the most effective manner.

Here are a few tips to help find that balance:

Become an Expert
No matter the project, it’s always necessary for the primary developer contacts to know the ins and outs of the client’s business model. Getting the developer acquainted with the business should be the main focus of the initial meetings. With that said, it’s the responsibility of the client to clearly present its overarching business objectives, as well as specific goals for the project. This allows the developer to work effectively with the business, while ensuring that the new mobile application or website meets its requirements. This can be a difficult process, but it will keep the project on-track and on-time.

Establish a Two-Way Conversation
Too often, clients go into a project with little understanding of the development process, leading them to believe that their design will be a success, as long as programmers stick to the guidelines they give them; that is not always the case. In order to have a strong business-developer relationship, and a successful launch, businesses need to find a developer (or developers) who views their role to be just as much an adviser as a code writer. This encourages a two-way conversation where the business can feel comfortable asking the developer questions, and the developer feels comfortable using his/her creative freedom to accomplish the project’s goals.

Eliminate Unused Employee Creativity
In order for a partnership to be successful, a “lean philosophy” must be taken. Lean focuses on identifying and removing waste. One of the most important and often overlooked ways to eliminate waste is through “Unused Employee Creativity.” Unused Employee Creativity is when the project leaders don’t ask for feedback from the people doing the actual work. In order to ensure quality, it’s necessary to receive input from the programmers and coders working first-hand with the new website or app. This not only benefits the finished product, but it also helps inspire the programmers by giving them a greater sense of ownership over the project. It’s also important for business leaders and other stakeholders to elicit feedback from every developer working on the project. This allows leaders to always be up-to-date on the status of the new site or app.

In the end, the basis of a good long-term business-developer relationship is proper communication. Once an end goal has been established, communication streamlines the process and eliminates any misunderstandings that might happen along the way, resulting in a more successful product. Those who are able to find the perfect balance of ideas are guaranteed to find the development process enjoyable and mutually beneficial.

About the Author: Patrick Emmons is co-founder of Adage Technologies, and an accomplished technical architect with more than 15 years of programming and Web development experience. Prior to Adage, Patrick was a principle for another Web development firm and also worked as a developer and consultant for Ameritech, Motorola and Baker Robbins.

Take Your WordPress Site Mobile

Michael Garrity — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:15:00 GMT

Much of the appeal of the WordPress platform is that it makes it easy to create an affordable, functional, and often feature-rich website without requiring extensive knowledge of the “nuts and bolts” of website development.

So when it suddenly became important to have a mobile-optimized website to stay competitive, many business owners or bloggers who aren’t necessarily experts in the field probably felt a pang of dread. However were they supposed to create another version of their sites that could work on an array of mobile devices?

Over time, a natural demand for easy-to-use mobile Web design solutions led to the creation of platforms like DudaMobile, which helps webmasters quickly and efficiently build a customized version of their websites that is optimized for most mobile devices. When DudaMobile noticed that a significant percentage of its customers were working with WordPress-powered websites, it seemed like a natural decision to streamline the optimization process by creating the DudaMobile WordPress plugin.

Released just last month, the new DudaMobile plugin saves WordPress users a significant amount of time and effort. It also makes it easy to optimize WordPress blogs with unique mobile-friendly templates, in addition to a number of useful add-ons and features for business websites that help them leverage the power of the mobile Web sooner, rather than later.

The plugin is easy to install and activate, and after that, it’s just one click to get started. DudaMobile will automatically render an “initial version” of a user’s mobile site and provides previews of what it will look like on the four major mobile operating systems (Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phones). These previews can always be accessed during the optimization process to allow users to examine their changes as they make them.

Once the initial version is rendered, users can customize their mobile site in just four steps. The first is to choose a theme. When the site is first created, it uses the original template employed by the site, but for the mobile version, users are able to select a brand new website or blog theme.

The second step is the most involved and deals with the majority of the editing and customization. Users are able to totally customize the site’s header and logo, navigation menu, background and text, and footer, as well as add a home icon or remove content. (The options are slightly different for blogs, allowing for customization of the header and logo, home page, blog posts, comments, and the footer.) Perhaps the most important aspect, however, is the ability to add widgets, which greatly increase the functionality of the mobile sites.

This additional content is split into three categories for Business, Design, and Social features, including the ability to insert images or a photo gallery, a mobile map, a restaurant menu, PayPal functionality, a click-to-call option, and much more. However, it is important to note that many of these features are only available with a premium mobile site (more on that in a second).

After the site is customized, the third step is to take it live. Here, users can choose between the free basic plan and the premium plan, which costs nine dollars a month. The premium plan provides a wider range of features than the basic option, including Google AdSense integration that lets users to monetize their mobile sites. Premium sites also get a unique “m.” mobile URL, while the basic users receive a standard DudaMobile mobile URL.

When the mobile site is live, all that is left to do is redirect the URL so that the mobile optimized site is loaded in mobile browsers. This is literally as simple as clicking “YES” to confirm the mobile site URL at the end of the process.

As you can see, with the new DudaMobile plugin, it’s cheap and easy to take your WordPress website or blog mobile. In just a few quick steps, you can begin leveraging the power of the mobile Web, and you can always go back and edit, customize, or add features to your mobile site as needed, which is especially helpful since DudaMobile will be adding new capabilities to the plugin every three weeks.

Create an iOS-Ready Site with This New Tool

Michael Garrity — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 03:00:00 GMT

International domain name registrar and cloud hosting provider Gandi wants to help you be iOS-ready with its latest product, Gandi Basekit.

This new website creation tool was built for compatibility with Apple iOS devices, meaning iPhones and iPads. Customers create sites that will be easily, automatically viewable on these mobile devices; and, of course, they will be hosted by Gandi.

Oh, and it’s totally free.

Websites can be created using HTML5 and CSS style sheets, an important component in developing for iOS, which doesn’t support Flash. This does away with the need to set up Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) systems for similar functionality.

The tool comes with a variety of features and benefits for users. For instance, it was designed for ease-of-use, and offers preconfigured and customizable theme templates, so users can start building their websites in no time. That being said, it also comes with a powerful infrastructure for more advanced developers, providing tools that allow experts to directly edit their sites’ HTML and CSS codes using preset or user-supplied graphics and images.

And, one cannot forget the integrated social media tools (including link installation for the most widely used social media sites), e-commerce integration with a Google Checkout widget for payment functionality and intuitive content management that allows users to edit block text, add more blocks, reposition images and add a submit button or navigation menu using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Basekit is the latest in Gandi’s portfolio of free tools. It is currently available for all of Gandi’s customers.

Adobe on Mobile Flash: "No Mas"

Michael Garrity — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:00:00 GMT

It was a valiant fight, but the outcome was inevitable. Sometimes, you just have to put the gloves down and admit defeat.

This week, Adobe officially announced that it was going to cease the development of Flash for mobile browsers. This move definitively sends the future of mobile development and the creation and deployment of mobile content towards HTML5.

Of course, most people saw this coming. The bulky Flash Player system, which at its creation was designed for desktop computers, has struggled (to say the least) in its transition to mobile. Major mobile developers noted this and almost unanimously supported HTML5 development.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple were all rooting for HTML5, especially Apple. In fact, the late Steve Jobs refused to support Flash for the iOS version of Apple's Safari browser, saying that "Flash was designed for PCs using mice."

"HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively," says Danny Winokur, Adobe's Vice President and General Manager. "This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms."

He adds, "We are excited about this, and will continue to work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers."

Following the upcoming update of mobile Flash with Flash Player 11.1, the software company will discontinue the development of the product.

Flash will always have a place, though. It will remain, indefinitely, a major part of the Web for PC users; in fact, the company is already working on Flash Player 12.

"These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have the most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video," says Winokur.

Maybe it sounds a little bit (a lot) like a concession speech, but Adobe can still hang its head high-ish. The mobile Web is the next big transition for the Internet, and it is unavoidable that there will be some casualties. There is an important lesson to be learned here, both by Adobe and future mobile Web developers. By doubling down on PC development, Flash can maintain its widespread presence on the PC-based Web, which is still where the majority of users remain (for now).

Smaato Measures Mobile Fill Rates and CTRs

Michael Garrity — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:00:00 GMT

A quarter two study by mobile ad optimization platform Smaato was released today and finds that ad inventory has been increasing at a faster rate than budgets, ulitmately leading to a decline in advertising fill rates.

The study was put together to look at a variety of mobile Web-based topics, including mobile ad adoption, fill rates and the overall effect on mobile ad network performance.

Another discovery that the study unearthed is that phones using Windows' mobile operating system had much higher clickthrough rates (CTRs) than iOS, Android, Blackberry and Symbian, both in the United States and across the globe.

Mobile Ad Networks
According to the study, the average ad network fill rate, worldwide, was 18 percent in quarter two of this year. That represents a 2 percent drop from quarter one and a 3 percent decrease from quarter two of 2010.

For the top 40 mobile advertising networks in the world, rates varied greatly, from 3 to 58 percent, but among the top 20 networks in the U.S., rates consistently declined from an average of 27 to 19 percent.

Smaato CEO Harald Neidhardt cites both the downturned economy and "an increasingly fragmented market" as reasons for the decline.

However, one bright spot that the study found was that there are typically higher returns for networks engaging in "specialization," such as offering a service like geo-location. Nine of the top 40 global networks that were specialized performed above the average Smaato index despite having smaller volumes than their competitors.

Mobile OS CTRs
Moving past networks and onto operating systems, the study measured the CTRs of various devices using different OS platforms.

Worldwide across operating systems, the highest CTRs to lowest, in order, were Windows Phones (taking the top spot for the second consecutive quarter), Symbian, RIM, iOS and Android, though the Google-owned OS saw its performance increase by nearly 50 percent from the same time last year.

It's a different outlook in the U.S., however, with Windows Phones just barely ahead of iOS, RIM out performing Symbian, and Android still trailing all of them.

Never fear, however, as Neidhardt sees a bright future for Android. "As the trend continues, we will see even greater demand from big brands and advertisers for the Android platform, and therefore greater revenue opportunities for publishers and developers as Android continues to proliferate."

Need a Career? Go Mobile!

Mike Phillips — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Dice.com - a job board specializing in the tech industry - released findings from an online survey that shows a major lack of mobile developers in the workforce. The very good news is that companies are looking to hire.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, "Almost 57 percent of employers and outside recruiters that hired for mobile-related jobs this year plan to boost such hires in the next 12 months, the survey, conducted on behalf of Bloomberg Businessweek.com, showed. More than half the respondents described the supply of quality mobile-software designers and engineers as 'scarce.' "

Driving this great need and opportunity is companies' desire for mobile apps - from iPhone to Android and BlackBerry. Of course, where there is demand, there is money to be made.

The survey found that:

The most common salary range for mobile developers was $75,000 to $100,000, with 28% of respondents saying they pay $100,001 to $125,000.
Experience with Apple's mobile platform carried the most weight on résumés, with 72 percent of recruiters saying they are hiring for development of iPhone applications, and 38 percent saying iPhone expertise is the most attractive among platforms.
About 60 percent are hiring for Android development, and 23 percent said new recruits with knowledge of Google's platform are most highly prized.
This month, Dice's site had 758 job listings requiring skills or experience with the iPhone, up from 264 a year ago. The site had 685 listings requiring Android skills, up from 158.