Mobile Apps Archives

Tag Archive for: Mobile Apps

Refactoring Mobile Apps

March 6, 2024/in App Development, Mobile, MobileTogether /by David McGahey

The best ideas for new features and other improvements to existing software apps often come from enthusiastic users. Implementing new features creates opportunities for refactoring mobile apps. After several years using the MobileTogether Solar Data Tracking app to monitor the performance of a rooftop solar system, my friend Casey had a suggestion.

The app displayed one page of charts and tables to report production by month over a year and another page to report daily production for the last 30 days. Navigation buttons on each page enabled easy switching between views. Casey’s suggestion was to revise the app to place all the charts and tables on a single page. Over time mobile users have become accustomed to mobile apps that present data in long pages that scroll with a quick one-finger swipe motion. A one-page app would feel smooth and more up-to-date.

MobileTogether Adds In-App Purchasing

July 7, 2021/in App Development, mobile development, MobileTogether /by Erin Cavanaugh

The latest release of MobileTogether introduces new tools for monetizing your apps and integrating them in new ways – making the platform even more flexible and useful for developers in firms of all types and sizes.

If you haven’t tried the MobileTogether framework for rapidly building enterprise apps and native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and more, now is the time. Learn about all the new features below and try MobileTogether Designer for free.

Announcing new features in MobileTogether

Web Service Error Handling in Mobile Apps

July 10, 2019/in Development, mobile development, Software /by David McGahey

Mobile phones bring a world of information to our fingertips, but functionality of even the best-designed mobile apps can be impacted by Web service errors that occur when communicating with external servers. Intermittent cell phone service in remote locations can also degrade app performance when looking up data.

MobileTogether, the low-code, cross-platform mobile app development tool from Altova, includes features that let developers gracefully handle Web service errors in mobile apps to avoid burdening end-users with unexpected app interruptions or cryptic error messages.

In an earlier post we explained HTTP error handling in a MapForce data mapping. Now we’ll look at the same Web service in a mobile app and describe error handling in MobileTogether.

New Features for Mobile App Development in MobileTogether 3.2

May 9, 2017/in Applications, Development, Mobile /by Erin Cavanaugh

The latest release of Altova’s mobile app development framework introduces over 18 features with highlights including support for NFC messages, text-to-speech, the ability to read device contacts, flexible options for dynamic tables, and more.

Read more below or check out our quick MobileTogether 3.2 video.

New in MobileTogether

Automated Testing for Mobile App Development

November 22, 2016/in Development, Mobile, Software, Tools /by David McGahey

Robust and repeatable testing improves any software development project. If you’re creating a mobile app, testing is especially critical given the unpredictable range of end user devices and location variables. Altova MobileTogether includes sophisticated Automated Testing features that let developers:

Record a series of user actions as a test case
Replay the test case in the MobileTogether Designer Simulator environment
Deploy test cases to the MobileTogether Server for replay on a variety of client devices
Retrieve Test Run results from the server and compare differences

Automated Testing for Mobile Apps

You can even modify the app to fix a bug and run the test case again to validate the results of changes, which makes this an indispensable QA tool for your mobile app development process.

Don’t Make This App Development Mistake

February 10, 2016/in Applications, Development, Mobile /by Erin Cavanaugh

You’ve done everything right, making sure your app has powerful access to back end data, a beautiful and intuitive UX, and availability for iOS, Android, and even Windows phones. It’s in the app stores and ready for those five star ratings. What could you possibly have overlooked?

You’re too mobile.

10 Reasons to Pick MobileTogether Over Microsoft PowerApps

December 2, 2015/in Development, Mobile /by Erin Cavanaugh

Microsoft’s recent announcement of their new PowerApps product comes at an interesting time, considering that MobileTogether has been on the market for over a year now. Though Microsoft is a bit late to the game with this offering, their announcement serves to underscore the importance of enterprise mobility and the challenge that MobileTogether was created to solve: businesses need to mobilize essential processes – for all devices – in a reasonable amount of time.

MobileTogether has been filling this need for over a year now, allowing developers and power users with no mobile development experience to build powerful, data-centric apps. If you can build formulas in Excel or write simple SQL queries, you have the technical skills needed to build a robust, sophisticated app using MobileTogether. While PowerApps may be a boon for Office users who need to mobilize simple productivity tasks via basic apps, MobileTogether lets customers take it many steps further, adding rich functionality for processing, analyzing, and collecting data in ways that add value beyond simple mobile access to services.

And in the 2.0 version of MobileTogether, Altova brought the same ease of developing cross-platform business solutions to building fully native apps for all mobile platforms. This is something that PowerApps promises to do – but you only get native apps from PowerApps if you develop the mobile app by hand via the native SDKs on each platform or use a cross-platform framework like Xamarin and then access PowerApps APIs on Azure. In contrast, building cross-platform native AppStore apps in MobileTogether 2.0 is really just a matter of selecting the “Generate code” command from the menu.

The Microsoft PowerApps announcement can be really confusing to parse, so we’ve put together a list of the top 10 reasons why we believe MobileTogether is superior to PowerApps.

How PowerApps compares to MobileTogether

ERN Registration for SSL use in Mobile Apps

November 18, 2015/in Applications, Development, Mobile /by Alexander Falk

Apps built with MobileTogether include the ability to use SSL encryption between the mobile app and the back-end server, and with it come restrictions on importing and exporting the app in the United States and potentially other countries. If you intend to submit the AppStore App to Apple’s App Store or Microsoft’s App Store (and potentially others), their submission processes will ask whether the app includes encryption. Since all AppStore Apps built with MobileTogether include the ability to use the OS-provided libraries for SSL use in mobile apps and in particular for the encryption of the communication between the mobile app and server using the https protocol, the answer to this question is “YES.” At some point in the process, this answer will then trigger a prompt to upload your Encryption Registration Number (ERN). So how does one obtain an ERN?

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