Mobile application development: platforms, patterns, and practices

Mobile technology has transformed the world in a multitude of ways since the walkie-talkie size handsets of the 1980s. Smart phones are virtually ubiquitous in the industrial nations where internet access via mobile devices has overtaken "fixed" access. Tablet devices such as the iPad and XOOM have transformed people's expectations of handheld devices. In the less developed parts of the world, mobile networks are connecting far flung communities and previously hard to reach groups.

This issue of Perspectives is focused on mobile technology. We have a case study that illustrates the positive social impact of mobile technology, an article by Martin Fowler discussing cross-mobile frameworks, a podcast introducing an open source IoS testing application, and several articles on mobile phone development.

ThoughtWorks is working with an increasing number of clients in iOS applications, and applying the tools and techniques that they have used successfully on other types of projects on these applications.

In this podcast moderated by ThoughtWorker Chris Stevenson, Peter Hodgson (developer and principal author of Frank), Derek Longmuir (developer and contributor to Frank) and Hiyasmin Dimaranan (QA on the project) discuss an iPad application being developed for a Fortune 100 financial institution. The team has been working with a new UI testing framework called Frank. They talk about the way the team works with UI testing and some of the challenges facing teams applying these techniques to iOS application development.

Cycletel

ThoughtWorks' Social Impact Program is putting mobile communications to work by getting critical reproductive health messages out to millions of women in developing countries.

The Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) of Georgetown University empowers women worldwide by helping them take charge of their reproductive health. In 2001, IRH created a fertility awareness-based family planning method known as the Standard Days Method® (SDM). It's a straightforward and low-cost method based on avoiding unprotected intercourse on 12 specific days around the middle of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Used correctly, SDM is 95% effective, comparable to other current user-controlled methods for preventing unplanned pregnancy.

Researchers at IRH India’s Country Office felt that an opportunity existed with SMS (mobile phone) text-messaging as a way to directly reach women in need of family planning. Mobile phone use is already high, and growing, in the developing world. A three-phase study was conducted in 2009 in Lucknow, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, to see if mobile phone text-messaging would be a viable way to enroll, advise and support women who want to use SDM.

The study showed that help-line support would be important to go along with the text messaging service, which is now called CycleTel. It was also found that couples were willing to pay a small amount each month for the service, necessary to make it sustainable and scalable, both of critical importance to IRH’s objective.

With a few meetings over a space of several weeks, team members of ThoughtWorks’ Social Impact Program put together a detailed proposal for the CycleTel project that met all of IRH’s requirements.

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Avishek Sen Gupta iOS AppDev Patterns: Linked Content Cursors
In an earlier blog post, Avisek talked about the Content Cursor pattern . This post is an extension of that idea to increase the flexibility of layouts across sections.

Nicholas Bailey Watch this space: JQuery Mobile
JJQuery Mobile is a web-based framework that can be used to create web-apps for all kinds of mobile devices. It provides an optimised experience for touch-based smart-phones and tablets, while still allowing older devices to access the content. It is supported by the JQuery community.

Martin Fowler CrossPlatformMobile
With the rise of so many mobile platforms, each with a different UI, many people are looking at cross-platform toolkits. These allow you to write a mobile app once and then deploy it to a range of mobile devices. Are these toolkits worth using?

Sumeet Moghe Mobile Learning Best Practices and Lessons Learned with @JudyB
In this blog post, Sumeet talks about what he learned at a session on mobile learning best practices conducted by mobile learning strategic analyst Judy Brown.

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ThoughtWorks launches consulting services in India
BANGALORE, May 4, 2011 - Global IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, Inc. today announced the launch of its Consulting Services Offering in India. Founded in 1993, ThoughtWorks has consistently improved competitive advantage, innovation and growth for market-leading companies by helping them adopt collaborative and adaptive methods in software development projects globally.

Tired of Playing Ping-Pong with Dev, QA and Ops?
May 10, 2011 - IT organizations are under ever increasing pressure to deliver software faster and more reliably. On the one hand, businesses are being squeezed by faster-moving competition. On the other hand, IT is often spending upwards of 70 percent of their budget on operations, much of which is spent maintaining mission critical systems on heterogeneous and legacy platforms.