We have released a new update to the Art Institute of Boston app today. This update brings a new interface, that loads faster and acts more efficiently. There are now four blogs included of different departments at AIB.
App features include:
- News from the AIB Facebook feed
- Shuttle Schedule from all the Lesley Campuses
- Mobile view of student artwork
- Library searching
- Links to department blogs
This app update has been rebuilt from scratch on an HTML5 and CSS architecture, using the PhoneGap open source web-app framework. This allows for faster, more efficient design, usability and updating.
If you already own the app, update today! If you are interested in the Art Institute of Boston, download the app to see all that AIB has to offer.
If 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.
Last week Apple announced to all their developers, and the world, that they would be adjusting their terms for app development. They have made it more flexible for developers to make apps by allowing some third party development environments and languages, instead of using their proprietary version of Obj-C called CocoaTouch. While their Xcode environment is very sophisticated and powerful, app developers were also forced to learn a programming language that only a small portion of developers were using.
Technical languages aside, what does this mean? In a nutshell, developers writing in cross platform, web-standard languages (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS), can create apps now with only a minimal amount of programming in CocoaTouch.
For us here at Dirk+Weiss, this means we can make apps more efficiently. We can also make prototypes that could be styled with CSS to run in your browser, rather than having a physical device. Now, of course, this does not mean that you negate testing phases for apps, it just gives our clients a more realistic proof of concept and prototype.
If you’re a frequent Dirk+Weiss visitor, you probably noticed something new and potentially striking about our typography. Yes, it’s true, we’re using Georgia in conjunction with our tried and true Helvetica. This combination creates a fresh and sophisticated dialog of type.
You’re looking at the brand new Dirk+Weiss website! This layout and structure is much easier to navigate and hopefully feels a little more approachable (we’re really nice guys… really). We’ve moved our blog to the front page to confront our core traffic and we have also revamped some of our copy to be a faster read and perhaps more concise. We’ve incorporated YouTube and HTML5 in various locations of the new architecture. That pesky, proprietary, and non iOS friendly Adobe Flash format is simply too clumsy.
We are using and recommending to our clients the use of the most current web standards and various JavaScripting libraries including JQuery and MooTools.
We hope that all these things will make for a more efficient, and enjoyable Dirk+Weiss experience.
