First it was Facebook now it is LinkedIn. LinkedIn rolled out yesterday their newest versions of their Mobile Apps. Going against what they had preached in the past, they left HTML5 and web-based applications to go Native. For the past year, since Facebook decided to make their apps native, LinkedIn’s app was the go to […]
We meet a lot of ordinary people that have a great idea for a mobile app. Ideas for apps that change how people do things everyday. The interesting thing about many of the most successful ideas is that they are not radically new or completely different. Instead they build on other ideas and refine them to suit a very particular niche or need. There is always some little change that will better suit different people or different businesses. Usually these changes are things that satisfy a particular need. Often the change is to better suit what we do or how we do things. These little differences are the main reason companies decide to build their own applications instead of using some already existing apps. There are many examples throughout the app store of different apps that do the same thing in slightly different ways, from calendars to feed readers. One great example of how subtle differences can be taken advantage of is Bypass. Bypass uses tablets and their own custom apps to simplify commerce, and concessions in particular, on sports and entertainment properties. Bypass is taking their target market by storm. Their mobile solution that allows sports and entertainment venues to do two things: Sell through a mobile interface. Integrate all the available information gathered through all the devices in the cloud, in order to have a complete view of the sales. You might ask yourself, how is this different from a mobile point of sales system. Functionally there is nothing different. They all do the same work. They all record the same basic things like how many sales have been made and how customers paid. The difference is that Bypass took into consideration the specific necessities of the sports and entertainment venues: Bypass makes it easier for workers to go around a venue and sell the products. Their user interface is designed to accomodate all of the usual products that are sold on sports and entertainment venues. Bypass makes it easier for people to sell on the floor without having to be near any wired terminals or other stationary hardware. These changes although they might seem small and to a certain extent negligible, have helped Bypass secure big venues such as Barclays Center in Brooklyn and Pepsi Center in Denver to use the service. Bypass shows how some little changes can make all the difference in your mobile strategy. If you are a company who is looking for an application that will suit your needs 100% and haven’t found an out of the box application that can do that for you, contact us here at OptimusMobility. We specialize in developing custom enterprise grade mobile applications that will completely fulfill your needs.
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We meet a lot of ordinary people that have a great idea for a mobile app. Ideas for apps that change how people do things everyday. The interesting thing about many of the most successful ideas is that they are not radically new or completely different. Instead they build on other ideas and refine them […]
The role of technology in business is not different from what we expect from technology in every other sense; it is aimed making daily tasks easier and helping the process become more productive. Through the surge of mobile devices and applications, our daily lives have become easier to manage and have the potential (if used […]
It is an exciting time for us here at OptimusMobility. For some time now we’ve had different processes to test apps on different platforms. For iOS, we uploaded new builds to TestFlight where our testers are able to quickly access the new builds. TestFlight is a service that allows users to upload and distribute apps for testing through the cloud removing a lot of the pain of sharing new builds. On Android we emailed the APK file to our testers who then installed it directly on their testing devices. Now that is all about to change, the TestFlight app has released the beta version of their service for Android. How will this new service impact Optimus? Here at Optimus we use this application widely to test our iOS apps (as described in this previous blog post). We can distribute it to our team (and our customers’ team) who have different devices and who are all around the world. This way we can get a good idea of how our app will behave. With Android apps, we tried replicating this by emailing the APK file to be manually installed. It worked well enough, but all of those APK files floating around made it easy for people to lose track of which build is the latest one. The addition of Android to TestFlight will make life easier for us and for customers and will decrease the time we take to distribute and test Android Applications. We look forward to working more with TestFlight to provide our customers with a better app experience and especially we look forward to TestFlight for Windows phone (hint, hint).
The post TestFlight for Android appeared first on OptimusMobility.
It is an exciting time for us here at OptimusMobility. For some time now we’ve had different processes to test apps on different platforms. For iOS, we uploaded new builds to TestFlight where our testers are able to quickly access the new builds. TestFlight is a service that allows users to upload and distribute apps […]
One of the first thoughts that came into my mind when Android came out was: how is Google going to make money from an open source operating system for mobile phones? Many people, myself included at the time, believe that Google is diversifying; they are trying to do everything and compete with everyone. I don’t […]
Continuing with our goal of killing the clipboard. I will take this opportunity to share another great benefit that you, as a manager or business owner, will get from converting your pen, paper and clipboard culture into an electronic, mobile based one: Compliance and control. It is impossible to to guarantee that the people filling out your paper-based forms are doing it right. People screw up tick-this-box voting, so they are going to screw up forms with more challenging requests even worse. As an extreme example lets say we are performing some type of market research where our employees are required to go to different stores and gather some type of information. How are you sure people are actually going to the stores to gather this information? Using a clipboard culture how do you know they are just not sitting at home making up the information? This is not a problem using mobile technology and electronic forms. Mobile devices are equipped with a wide arrange features such as GPS locators and time trackers. Taking advantage of the mobile device’s hardware features as well as the fact that through software logic we can control access to questions (like the order of questions and acceptable responses) we can begin to control user compliance and give the manager or business owner insight into usage patterns for electronic forms. There are three main things we can track that our experience here at OptimusMobility has taught us make a big difference: Time: By introducing a time stamp on every form being created we verify the form is being filled out at the time correct time. Location: By creating a location stamp using the devices GPS locator, we can make sure the information is being gathered from the correct place. Logic: Every form has its own logic and through the use of software logic we can make sure it is followed as it was intended. Some examples of this include: making sure all the required information is being filled out and validating that the questions are being answered with proper data. Accountability and control are just two of the many advantages to switching to electronic forms both in the office and out in the field. Here at OptimusMobility we will work with you in order to understand your business needs and help you achieve an application that fulfills your needs. Contact us for our free 1-hour consultation and see how we can help your business become more productive by killing the clipboard.
The post Killing the Clipboard: Accountability and Control through mobile electronic forms appeared first on OptimusMobility.
Continuing with our goal of killing the clipboard. I will take this opportunity to share another great benefit that you, as a manager or business owner, will get from converting your pen, paper and clipboard culture into an electronic, mobile based one: Compliance and control. It is impossible to to guarantee that the people filling […]
For the past weeks, I have been writing a lot about the tools we use here at Optimus in order to create great mobile applications. Continuing with this trend it is time to check how we perform acceptance testing. Acceptance testing is a type of testing that happens once all of the code for a […]