Like many software development shops, we at Collective Idea have our own best practices when it comes to developing mobile applications. These practices run the gamut from setting up the environment, to how we produce builds for both clients and the app store. Being supporters of open-source, we thought it would be interesting to share these practices with the rest of the development community.

To that end, this is just the first in a series of blog posts from our mobile application development team. We’ll cover how we do what we do. Along the road, we will also touch on some of the latest technologies for both iOS and Android.

To provide an overarching narrative, we will be building one mobile application for both iOS and Android over the course of this blog series. For that application, we have chosen to build a mobile version of our donuts web app. The idea behind the web application is simple: Let people in the office know when someone is bringing donuts so that we don’t double up. (Yes, that is an issue from time to time).

Kicking Things Off

The mobile application will start out simple enough. We first need one screen that displays if someone is bringing donuts or not. It should also have a button to allow us to indicate that we would like to bring donuts on that day. We came up with some basic wireframes to outline the process and validate that it is indeed what we are looking for.

Once we agreed upon the overall design, our designers helped us come up with final assets as well as put polish to the application.

In our next blog post in the series, we will be covering how we at Collective Idea set up our environments for an application. Until next time, keep thinking “donuts”.

Android

Part 2 - Getting Our Environment Set Up for Android

Part 3 - Using TDD to build our models and API client

iOS

Part 2 - Getting Our Environment Set Up for iOS

Part 3 - Building a Cheap Prototype to Validate Design