Macadamian Blog

Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps - When to Build a Native App

Companies developing applications for the smartphone market often ask us whether it’s better to create a native application using platform-specific tools, or a web application using modern web technologies. In our experience, the answer depends on the platform, availability and distribution requirements of the app in question.

In this, the second of five articles in our Mobile Cross-Platform Series, we’ll examine the advantages that native platform brings to the cross-platform dilemma. To do this, we’ll look at WebMD and examine why, in our opinion, WebMD made the right choice in building a native application for its WebMD portal.

We build a VoIP Recorder on the Junos SDK

Developing carrier-grade software is no easy feat. The requirement for robustness, quality, and security can't be underestimated - slow down the network for a few minutes and thousands of dollars in missed revenue start adding up very very quickly. Things got a little easier a few months ago with the introduction of the Junos SDK, which lets you write high-performance network applications that run safely right on Juniper routers. The list of uses is huge - encryption, deep-packet inspection, intelligent agents, to name just a few. We decided to take the Junos SDK for a spin, and write a VoIP recorder that would monitor and record VoIP calls on a Juniper network. In less then 70 man days (around a month in total) we had a working app. 

The Android Revolution is upon us, and its not about the smartphone

Debates are raging endlessly about who will win the smartphone war - will it be Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, or RIM? Many bloggers assert that Android will dominate, but to me, that's missing the bigger point. Apple will continue to be a force because people *desire* iPhones and iPads, RIM has a strong installed base in the enterprise that won't be going away anytime soon, and Microsoft will make a strong showing with their handset manufacturer relationships and huge marketing budget. The really exciting thing about Android is that it enables startups and Fortune 500 companies to design connected devices for a fraction of the cost.

Designers and Engineers Unite!

At Macadamian we have a marketing challenge that has me stumped. When we describe that our core competency is both in User Experience design and software engineering, we often get blank stares. 

In the software industry, most consulting firms focus on one or the other. For us, it creates a classic Trout/Ries positioning challenge - people want to place us in the development bucket, or the design bucket. Furthermore, most software organizations approach the link between UX design and engineering in the same way - they either contract out the design and develop the product in-house, they hire two separate firms, or they in-source it, meaning their design team is a separate entity, on the other side of the building, that designs the product and throws it over the wall to the engineering team. 

The trouble is, by looking at design and development as a serial process, most software companies are missing an opportunity to create better products. Tight collaboration between UX design and software teams, where the two teams work together from day-one to release, create more cohesive, and more desirable products. Here's why:

iPhone vs Android vs Windows Phone 7

A few weeks ago, we started an experiment we are chronicling in a blog called The Mobile Experience. We set out to create an application across three different mobile platforms, to really get a sense for how difficult it is to create a mobile app across three different platforms at the same time. It's something that many of our customers are dealing with as they start to extend their products into mobile. Which platforms do I concentrate on? Which are the most time consuming to develop on? How are the UI paradigms and standards different?

Every week or so we'll be summarizing some of our findings in our main blog. This week I'll focus on some of our early feedback about what it's like to develop on each one of these platforms - which has the most complete toolkits, and what's it like to ramp up a development team on each platform?