It's an app!

This week we delivered an app for iOS devices.  It's a mobile portal to our enterprise operations platform, and it actually is pretty cool, robust and functions well.  It connects to our EC2-based infrastructure over a secure connection.  You wouldn't use it unless you were a customer.

Our app is non-trivial - it interacts with our cloud-based systems to do schedule calculations and manage complex tasks.  It took us a while to develop and I think we got the first pass right.   Like any other piece of software,  there is things we can improve on, bugs we will find, and work flow improvement we will make over the next few release cycles,  but I am proud of what our team has accomplished.

This is not my first iOS app, but I learned somethings again in the process.

First - having a good iOS developer in-house to prime the pump is crucial.  Once the pump is primed, good software developers with deep experience can jump in, pick it up, and contribute.  We did the real thing - Objective C using Xcode.  I have not been impressed with third party iOS development packages and they lock you in to their framework.

Second - the app store approval process from Apple is still a pain.  They filter out incompetence by the complexity of the process.  Maybe it's on purpose.

Third - Mobile user interfaces are very different from web portals (no surprise).  We didn't look to re-invent the wheel here.  We looked at what others were doing and followed similar UI patterns. No need to complicate things.

The iOS ecosystem is cool.  I don't mind objective C and Xcode - I just wish approval and deployment were easier.