Magenic Company Blog

In this second in a series of three videos, Magenic’s John Himebook talks about working directly with Microsoft to develop applications in the Business Transformation category.

What’s the best way to expand the audience for your employee-facing or consumer- facing iPhone apps at the lowest cost? Simple: Create an iPad app along with your iPhone app.

It's not easy to introduce mobile strategy and tools into a long standing business practice. No one knows this better than Bally Total Fitness CIO Guy Thier. While we've talked with Guy in the past about bringing mobile to fitness, I had a chance to catch up with him from his office in Chicago to see how the project was going. Guy also talks about choosing and working with his partners as he develops the tools he needs to be successful.

Every company and their brother want to build a mobile app these days, and for good reason; it shows they are up with the times and gives their customers and employees tools to be more efficient and more productive.

So you’ve decided to develop an app for your business. You’ve even got it accepted in the App Store. Cool! According to the latest numbers, there are over a half million apps in the App Store. That’s your app and over 499,999 others. Yikes! So how do you get your little grain of sand noticed on this rather sizable beach?

I had a chance to catch a presentation at a recent Mobile Twin Cities gathering from Software Developer Andrew Cheron. Andrew has done some work with some major brands and spends a great deal of time exploring and developing games on Adobe Air. Adobe has decided that Air is where they want to spend their time in the mobile space and it’s a good thing that developers like Andrew are on board.

We hear a lot about how companies are using mobile to impact their business. Bally Total Fitness is one of those companies. In part one of my interview with Senior VP and CIO, Guy Thier, he shared some of the Mobile initiatives they’ve undertaken with Magenic. He also spoke about using mobile to help update the company image and increase sales.

One of the age-old challenges in project management is keeping all the members of the team on the same page – or even the in the same book – as the project changes and evolves. Long before the concept of a mobile workforce came along, project managers struggled to make sure the latest document, report, or task was available to everyone on the team, or all the cooks…even when they are in the same kitchen.

Separating the presentation of the application’s UI from the logic of its UI is usually a good idea. This separation of concerns creates more de-coupled code, which is much cleaner, and even allows for more unit testing coverage. Android bundles the UI and UI logic into the Activity class, which necessitates Instrumentation to test the Activity...