Saturday, March 24, 2012

[wire] stone Connect

Every now and then the company [wire] stone flies all its employee's from around the world to Vegas for a conference on team building, communication and improving company processes. [wire] stone is an interactive marketing firm so this year (2012) they decided to do some marketing on themselves from a social media compaign to mobile app apps and other interactive digital experiences. With that in mind I wrote the mobile application 'WS Connect' as a cross browser cross plateform mobile application running on iPhone/iOS, Andriod and Windows Phone. The best part was that it was the same code base on all three platforms.


WS Connect is an HTML based application using the Metro Design Aesthetic and is the same code base on all three platforms. The application uses things like JQuery and Knockout with its HTML and JavaScript to bring in social media data, news, scedule and other conference information. The application works is then hosted locally on the device using an HTML application host framework. On Android and iOS that is PhoneGap and on Windows Phone I used the HTML Application Hosty framework off codeplex.

With the help of CSS Expert Ryan Lane we got the CSS difference between the webkit based browser rendering engines in iOS and Android vs the IE engine entire gone which by itself is an achievement. As to code differences between PhoneGap and the HTMLApplicationHostFramework there was only lines lines of data access code for reading and writing name value pairs that was required. If you manage to find the applications on windows phone, android or the iOS app store you notice you need a registration key to make them work. You will need to contact me for that but here are a few more screen shots.