“Hold Harvard in the Palm of your hand” [App Release]
Friday, December 17th, 2010If you have every walked, driven, biked or ran through Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA, you have probably spotted those large groups of tourists being lead around by tour guides wearing straw hats and carrying signs. This is the Hahvahd Tour, and now they can say, “There’s an app for that”.
Today, a new application that we created went live into the iTunes App Store. Trademark Tours Presents: Harvard University, is a campus tour application for the prestigious institution, and is filled to the brim with great, rich content.
Creature Features
- Integrated Google Maps and GPS
- “Live Tour” footage
- Bonus Content Galore!
- Streaming Audio
- Harvard Square Business Directory
- Free Souvenier Map
- Integrated video in the app, no buffering
- Ability to jump to a stop anytime you wish
Development Insight
This application was built using PhoneGap, an open source framework that allows for developing mobile applications natively using HTML/CSS and JavaScript. The benefit of using PhoneGap over Apple’s own XCode Environment and Objective C programming, is the portability to other devices such as Android OS and Blackberry Apps. 
When developing this way, you can easily develop lighter-weight “Web Apps” that actually just use the browser framework that is native to the platform, rather than writing a code base from scratch. This elevates errors, but is not without some higher performance drawbacks. While things can run incredibly smooth in the web framework of these mobile devices, any more advanced animations, gaming or hardware intense acceleration is better off inside the native language.
This app also uses JQuery along with PhoneGap to create animations and navigation. Video and audio are using HTML5 standards.
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