BHS: Making of Diary Mobile

I started my job with Diary.com, a London-based startup, back in August 2010. Since then, I’ve worked on their webapp, which is based on Ruby-on-Rails, and spearheaded the development of Diary Mobile app in a platform agnostic way for faster releases to both the Apple AppStore and Android markets.

Diary Mobile was already a mobile app on the Apple AppStore before I joined. However, it was based on native Objective-C technology.

The old Diary Mobile:

agenda screen

events screen

todos screen

It used to look ok but there were subtle issues with this version. It simply was not robust in syncing the device data with the REST based server interface and vice versa. Moreover, the Objective-C developer was not committed with the startup on full-time basis causing major concerns for the fledgling startup.

At the time of my joining, a very cool designer also joined, and together we worked on a new HTML5, Phonegap & Sencha Touch based rewrite of the mobile app.

This rewrite took the same amount of time as the original development of the native Objective-C app. However, we focused really hard on optimizing the syncing part and also improving the overall experience for the end user.

The new Diary Mobile – HTML5, Phonegap & Sencha Touch

dashboard screen

events screen

notes screen

todos screen

settings screen

The results were encouraging with a lot of downloads. However, there are still rough corners that need addressing. I’ll be detailing the development in my upcoming posts.

HTML5 mobile application for App Store

I’d use the tools IntelliJ IDEA v 9, Android SDK v 2.2, PhoneGap v 0.9.1, ant v 1.8, ruby v 1.8.7 and java v 1.6.

http://phonegap.pbworks.com/Getting-started-with-Android-PhoneGap-in-Eclipse

On the last screen of the IntelliJ android project wizard take care of two things:

• The package name that you mention and

• Create “Hello World!” project, the Activity name

must be the same as the “package_name” and “name” of your application respectively when you created a phonegap blank project by running the droidgap script.

You may have to update the default android virtual device from “Select Run/Debug Configuration” drop down –> Edit Configurations –> Select appropriate Android Virtual Device from the drop down.

*Update

A lot of updates have occurred since I last wrote this post back in September  2010. I saved it as a draft to revisit with complete details. However, I got busy with my job and managed to launch a proper phonegap and Sench Touch application for both the iOS and Android platform – Diary Mobile.