Building your own apps? Try these top tips!

Many thousands of people are developing apps. Many of those apps fail dismally to achieve what the original vision holders hoped for. How can you increase the odds that your app will be used by, and useful for many?


The answer: learn from the gurus. Listen to those who have done it many times before.

The nice thing about building educational apps is that the financial models for them are different to normal consumer apps. Success is judged by how useful they are, as opposed to the revenue generated by shifting millions of copies. This is shared with in-house enterprise apps, where quite often the employee gets them for free, allowing the developers to focus on making apps as useful as possible, rather than stressing about pay-per-download.

What's the connection with our top tips?

The connection is that Apple have recently released an excellent guide for in house app developers, listing top tips, and advice that - although aimed at iOS developers making in-house apps, are in fact useful to ALL app developers, across ALL platforms.

The guide is divided into the four key stages of app development:

Starting with Planning: make sure you, and your people know what you are building, and all sign up to it.



Then looking at Design: great tips to help you simplify, and prioritise features, as well as interviews from gurus in this area

Next the actual Development: All you need to know to get started. The specifics here are obviously pretty Apple / iOS centric, but the sections on Web Development, and Back Office Integration are great advice whatever your platform 

Finally, Deployment: This section is pretty much 100% Apple. Very helpful if you are new to iOS development, but only of of brief interest to other app developers. 

Learn from the masters. It is a great overview that we recommend to any aspiring app developers.

If you like to print stuff out, go for the PDF version, otherwise dive in and get exploring on the online accelerator site.

Do you have any other tip tips sites you'd care to share?

Wave Riding Theory - a fresh look at learning technology adoption

Is there a gap between mobile learning theory, and practice?

How should teachers decide which approaches, technologies, or approaches to adopt with their mobile learning?

As part of my session at MobiMOOC 2012 we explored some of the current theories often applied to m-learning, trying to map them to practice.

Together with my team, we have been deeply involved in mobile learning (both envisioning it, and making it) for over 11 years, but very little of that time has been spent in pure theory, so it was an interesting exercise mapping some of the current theories to live examples, and then discussing with the attendees where the gaps lay (and how we might bridge them)

In the process, we realised that the most crucial step any practitioners needed to take was realising that mobile is coming at them whether they are ready or not. It is not a flood that can be stopped, more a wave that needs to be ridden! This wave-riding theme kept growing, as we discussed the different approaches to coping with the myriad of available devices and approaches, until it became a theory in it's own right!

The basic tenet of this, is an awareness that mobile consumer technologies are rushing towards us whether we are fully prepared for them or not. Already, more smartphones are sold than PCs, and a huge majority of our learners will use their mobile device as their primary reference / communication / collaboration tool (even if it is for Facebook!)

Rather than try to hold back the tide, our role as educational-techies is to help practitioners learn how to ride it. The wave is rushing at us regardless. It won't wait till we have perfected our art. Instead we just need to jump on, and learn as we ride.

We used this surfing-metaphor to look at various aspects of mobile learning, to extract our key advice. The next slides show advice both for Learning Designers, and for Implementers:

1: The importance of trial and error. Start small. Practice. Keep improving.

2: Keeping supple and flexible.

3: Building in resilience. Prepare for the unexpected.

4: Success is as ART as much as a science.

What do you think? Does the wave-riding metaphor work for you?

The mobiMOOC attendees certainly thought so, encouraging me to do this post, and proceeding to work with us to develop their own top tips for m-learning practitioners

I hope you find them useful!

Open Standards for m-learning?

As enthusiasm for m-learning grows around the world, and more mobile content gets developed, the problem of "re-use" keeps growing. If I build for an iPhone, what about Android? How can I ensure that all possible learners benefit from my awesome app? What happens with that great learning content I optimised for an earlier platform that is no longer popular?

If you are looking for guidelines on how to ensure longevity for your content without locking into one mega platform, or system, you have come to the right place.

We have been working with researchers and techies in UK, USA and Europe trying to understand the options, and build them into real apps which have been deployed across over 20 nations, via iTunes and Play app stores.

The bad news: there is no specific set of standards for m-learning to solve this

The good news: there are quite a few OTHER sets of standards that are very useful, if applied right.

The first step is to clarify exactly where you want to sit on the "native app, one device" <-> "simple media, all devices" spectrum. In our work we found huge benefits in making content as richly interactive as possible, so we have narrowed our focus to high-end devices only (smartphones, tablets, wifi devices), but because we invest a lot of our energy into the media quality, it is essential to us that it travels well between Android - iOS - Windows Phone - others

We have put ourselves here (see image above). We aim to put as much content as possible into html5, but do NOT deploy as a web app, rather wrapping it into a shell native app. 

I'll try to explain this a little more clearly, below 

We package our learning content into small, zipped packages of html5, ensuring all media files are formatted to play on all targeted devices. Packages can also contain non-html5 media (like eBooks). These we host on our online library. Users can download the app from the app store, and then log into our library, and download content. The same library, and the same content whatever the platform their app is running on.

We have spent the best part of the past year trying to optimise the balance between what is HTML (viewed in an embedded browser), and what is native. 

If you want to see this in action, download our Global MedAid app from your local app store. (it was made for the www.mole-project.net and includes a fairly weighty 40Mb of media, and content)

The screens above are from Global MedAid. You can see how some of the menus, search functions, popups are managed natively, while underlying content is in a browser window. The reasons are ALL performance based.

This is how we manage the "cross platform content" piece, but what about the wider standards? Our approach here is to look at every "join" between different layers, or different aspects of the platform, and then look for related standards. See below: 

Depending on exactly what you are needing to do, I'd suggest you look into the different standards listed here, to keep things as open, and re-usable as possible.

(And if you are thinking of signing up for a big authoring system offering you "mobile", make sure that you can get at open versions of your content at every one of those "joins"!)

The ideas, above, are working really well for us. We have apps built on this being used across the world, in several languages. The biggest of which is with a US Government learning portal, who has adopted this open approach, and is using it with all their mobile learning suppliers. All content is delivered, zipped and packaged up, into the cloud. Authorised users download an app designed for their particular smartphone, and then go and get whichever cross-platform mobile content / courses / tools / activities they want

If you are interested in further details, see also our free report on cross platform app development