In this tutorial we will demonstrate best practices in building native smartphone apps for business and informational purposes.  This includes approaches to smartphone app structure and navigation (very different from those used in web apps). It also includes how to best integrate device capabilities such GPS, PIM contacts, camera and audio and video capture.   Finally it shows how to build synchronized data apps to make information available to users when they are offline, and make them comfortable with editing and performing work remotely on occasionally disconnected mobile devices.   We'll wrap up with guidelines on making your apps available on various app stores and via internal distribution mechanisms.

We'll use the Rhomobile Rhodes framework and the RhoHub hosted smartphone app development service to enable getting rapid results.  Rhodes will also allow writing a single app and building it for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and other devices.   But the techniques and practices that we'll cover apply to using underlying SDKs (such as Objective C and the iPhone SDK)  for each of these phones.    Each lesson will consist of a small briefing followed by a handson exercise.  The end result will be a highly functional, usable, and attractive smartphone app running on multiple devices.

 

Lesson 1: Building Your First Smartphone App
Lesson 2: Optimal User Interfaces for Smartphones
Lesson 3: Using Device Capabilities in Your Apps
Lesson 4: Giving Your Users Synchronized Offline Data
Lesson 5: User Interfaces for Each Device
Lesson 6: Shipping Your App 

 

Keywords: Smartphone enterprise apps, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian,Windows Mobile, Ruby

Target audience: Any developer planning to build a smartphone app for mobilizing enterprise applications or data