iReka as Mobile Services

This our promotion right now. We offer mobile app development for your business at an affordable price. We understand that business people want the benifit of having mobile apps not the technologies. We will leverage the technology costs by having more people on board to share the app development costs.

It only gets better time to time. When people start using it, we will have a lot of work to make it run smoothly.

At start we offer AppBiz for Android. We will also provide the app back-end where app admin can logged in and manage the content of the apps.

Well, what so different with website you may ask, which if you have already mobile friendly. Mobile app specifically is offline-ready. Unlike web, we need a constant data to access to the information, by having the app, the data is cached, and user will see the last data they have accessed. It's not only faster loading, but also important when the data needed when there is no internet connection. The important data we store on the app are : contact information, events, photos etc.

Another important feature is push notification for the app. And it's tightly integrated to app's messanging or news system. Admin can send push notifications for the latest news or app support. What benefit the customers are they will have the latest news from your business, and have the proper Call to Action for the right link. Well, this is another marketing channel besides SMS or email which equally important.

Admin can control this on the admin panel on the web, which has the control about the information to show on the app. This part is on heavy development iteration, where we have to think how to scale up to support multi-clients with multi-apps with multi-platform. It's really how hard to think about the technical difficulties that we have to solve.

But to make it clear, for our clients, you can login to admin website, and you can see the core features that avalaible to you now.

And we hope we got the great drive to deliver the best for our clients and customers.

p/s: We love to have early adopter because we usually give more support, and some special help like to make marketing banner for the apps.

Android Development

Currently we are working on a news app. We pull the data from the server. So there is of iteration to make the app run more stable and faster.

• make the page view avalaible for 3 pages
• reduce API call
• save the JSON file.

It's important to know how to debug, and fine where is error in the code.

Learning Handling Copy from ResearchKit

As previous post, I did concern how to manage copy inside the app. So I did download ResearchKit and learn something about managing copy or string that display in your app.

Here is how they code a string

`ORKLocalizedString(@"CONSENT_NAME_TITLE", nil)`

The ORKLocalizedString is defined as follows.

#define ORKDefaultLocalizedValue(key) \

[ORKDefaultLocaleBundle() localizedStringForKey:key value:@"" table:@"ResearchKit"]

#define ORKLocalizedString(key, comment) \

[ORKBundle() localizedStringForKey:(key) value:ORKDefaultLocalizedValue(key) table:@"ResearchKit"]

And of course they translate the copy for these languages.

This are the most professional code for doing translation and copy.

Separating User-facing Text from your code
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPInternational/InternationalizingYourCode/InternationalizingYourCode.html

Copy inside App

For iOS apps, we use NSLocalizedString(NSString *string, NSString* ref) for make string to localized. Then we create Localizable.string for many languages, you need to make file for base language in our case English.

Then we create other localization from the list.

But this way is actually very cumbersome. We are looking some way to make this process easier and intuitive.

App Dashboard

For traditional development we only put data, information at build time where all of the stuff have to be finalized, properly checked and so on.

By having the dashboard, you have the full control of what your app should show the information on the app, in real time.

This is especially for app that is always directly connected to the network to get the information like tvOS app. Everytime you open the app it will always connected to the server, fetching what the latest feed.

• Push Notifications • App Data • Messages • Users • Analytics • In-App Feedback

And for the other apps, it also important to fetch lates news and information, if the user has the internet. The strong point of having mobile app rather than use the website is to have faster and caching to the latest information on the mobile phone. And if the phone is connected to the internet and we check the metadata first weather the data is latest that the metadata on the phone then only we do fetch and download the whole data. And it's important to check user's in on 3G or Wifi, or even worse signal. We know that if users on bad network it will takes longer time to download the data.

This user experience is related with which network you are connected with. We might to see the implementation for both iOS and Android.

Technically, the dashboard is time consuming and currently there are plenty of company that doing this things as services like Firebase, OneSignal etc. But some how, as whole, some company has some features, and another company has another features. So to have a complete control of the app, and complete solution, the way to do it is build by your own, and perhaps you can hook up the existing service with thier API.

At iReka Soft, we are just in plan to do this, clients are strongly use Wordpress as backend and also thier front-end as website for starter. Wordpress is actually being build to have API hooker so it can be used for app development someday. Doing with Rails is more time do use because the configuration and have complex detail to get start with it.

And lastly, naked PHP is sometime being used for simple API, it's very development stage that only suitable for developers to manage it. For testing, it just fine.

So for the app admin, it's most likely need to have app dashboard to control and manage their apps, and to make sure the operation in control without having too much reliance on the developer. For that, lets see want we can make for you guys.

Mobile Compatible

The UI for most dashboard seems only to support desktop. But to think when you gonna use the dashboard. Most likely when you are on the go. You want to see the analytics, what's going on, you want to make decision on the go. You want to do marketing, email people on the mobile. 

For developer, when on the go, we can't do the development so get the insight of what app is doing is what we are doing. 

Bootstrap Column : lg, md, sm

Looking at the Apple.com, the 4 panels below the hero changes 3 times according to device's width. So without further ado, lets dive into the concept and code.

<section id="featured-apps">
<div class="container-fluid">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 col-sm-6 box">
1
</div><!-- col -->
<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 col-sm-6 box">
2
</div><!-- col -->
<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 col-sm-6 box">
3
</div><!-- col -->
<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 col-sm-6 box">
4
</div><!-- col -->
</div><!-- row -->
</div><!-- container -->
</section><!-- featured-apps -->

Do You Want a Website?

We would like to ask some key questions if you do want to have a website.

1. Is it your first site or are you redeveloping an existing site?

2. What would you like to change about your site?

3. Are you looking to get new leads from your site?

4. Will you be selling a product and collecting payment online?

5. How often will content on your site change?

6. What existing brand or image assets do you have?